Kwame Appiah on western civilisation

There is no such thing as western civilisation. Erudite and all over the place. I do not know what to make out of it. Towards the end we have this passage:
"Culture – like religion and nation and race – provides a source of identity for contemporary human beings. And, like all three, it can become a form of confinement, conceptual mistakes underwriting moral ones. Yet all of them can also give contours to our freedom. Social identities connect the small scale where we live our lives alongside our kith and kin with larger movements, causes, and concerns. They can make a wider world intelligible, alive, and urgent. They can expand our horizons to communities larger than the ones we personally inhabit. But our lives must make sense, too, at the largest of all scales. We live in an era in which our actions, in the realm of ideology as in the realm of technology, increasingly have global effects. When it comes to the compass of our concern and compassion, humanity as a whole is not too broad a horizon."
I am concerned about the vagueness of the approach and sentences like the last one in the above quote. How many can have such effect? I have been acquainted with westerns, whatever that means, since 1964 and lived in the west for about half my life. When you talk to your neighbours or people on the street there are cultural differences since most people live locally. The problem seemed to me is that the percentage of people who are in the global circles has increased. It is not just the .1 percent, but this ten percent or so who are influential, from software engineers to bureaucrats in the European Union, who are influential in the global tends. It seems that they like most others are interested in their own well being as they see it and that is not helpful to the majority of the people. Since the influential sections are generally driven by their own self interests, we have system acting like a centrifugal force sucking the wealth upwards. When the economic growth decreases, this force inevitably marginalises the majority and tries to force them in to subsistence. I believe that armed resistance is futile in view of the strength of the centralised governments. There seem to no alternative to some resistance and decentralisation. Perhaps Fragmentation is the solution not the problem.
P.S.Trancripts of the lectures 1, 2, 3, and 4 which is the one linked above. I wrote the above responding to one paragraph in the fourth lecture which expresses a vague hope which I felt was unrealistic. The lectures as whole make a wonderful reading.

French economist Jacques Sapir

specialises on Russia has a wideranging interview. It seems to be translated from French. Some passages are not clear to me. In the English speaking world, we are mostly familiar with The names of British and American economists. Sapir would be consider heterodox I think but he has influential positions in the French institutions. Worth a look.

Kenneth Arrow on socialism

A cautious case for socialism from 1978. Commentary on this article and also "Two cheers for government regulation" by Daniel B. Klein in Kenneth J. Arrow. From the commentary "Kenneth Arrow was of the generation shaped by the Great Depression. Like many of them, he embraced socialism at an early age, and going forward his work was shaped by a deeply leftist sensibility. From several autobiographical reflections, it seems that over the decades Arrow’s thinking has continually moved from ideals he associates with socialism to a more pragmatic—or, perhaps, resigned—sense of reforming actually existing social democracy."
Related The misunderstanding at the core of economics has this quote from the article of Arrow above:
“In a system where virtually all resources are available for a price, economic power can be translated into political power by channels too obvious for mention. In a capitalist society, economic power is very unequally distributed, and hence democratic government is inevitably something of a sham.”

What to expect during Trump time

I have not been paying much attention to Trump since there is too much news and analyses all over the place about him. Here is an assessment by a risk analyst Ian Bremer. The interview starts with:
"

Ledbetter: In your 2015 book, Superpower, you describe three paths for America: Moneyball America, Independent America, and Indispensable America. Where do you see Trump taking us?

Bremmer: Very clearly, Independent. Obama's big problem was that he kept talking like this Indispensable America guy: "We can do it; Assad must go; Russia must leave Ukraine; we're going to drive the global-trade order withTPP and the TTIP," and all this. And he just did not have the ability to follow through and execute on any of this. The worst thing you can do is create high expectations and consistently fail. Vastly better to say, "We're really going to focus a lot more on the domestic environment. We still have global interests, but they're narrower." "

Along the way:

"

Is there a risk in the U.S. pulling back expectations and erasing ideas of exceptionalism on the global stage?

Will the American brand be damaged abroad? Here's where Trump could become a big problem. You want the Chinese to be so convinced that the American market model is the one that works that they have to buy our Treasuries, be educated at our universities, buy New York City real estate--it would be inane for them to do anything else. And that will in turn give us an awful lot of branding power. In 1991, you went to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union and you met people who truly believed that the American rule of law, independent judiciary, free market economy, and political system were to be admired. They don't believe that anymore. And Trump's view is "Yup, you're right--completely hypocritical. We shouldn't be trying to promote our values, because they're no different from anybody else's." That absolutely damages the American brand."

Final paragraphs:

"Do you factor in some really wacky but plausible scenario tied to Trump?

The one that's more exotic is Trump's conflict of interest issues, with this multibillion-dollar organization that will only be worth a lot more once he's president. That implies we need to think about the United States a little more like South Korea. It's not going to become Russia or China. But if you want to understand how other governments are going to react to [us], you need to look at two sets of policy mechanisms: the official, formal channel; and then the unofficial and informal channels, one of which will be a kind of industrial-policy, state-capitalist system and the other the family. And that's really wild. You look around in 2017 and you realize that the major driver of political risk in the world is this new U.S. government--not doing things that historically were done, and doing things that historically were not done. We may not want to have the leadership role that we once had, but we're still the world's only superpower. The outsize impact of all this stuff on the global economy will. and businesses is extra­ordinary."

Steve Waldman on institutions

"This usage of “institutions” becomes infuriatingly vague, but that may be why it is so prevalent. We need labels for all the things that we can’t quite pin down, because we know there are things we can’t pin down that are important in their effects.....The way I like to think of “institutions” is this: Institutions are to groups what habits are to individuals." says Steve Randy Waldman In a recent post.
I looked at the above after Ramarao Kanneganti suggested that I look at the idea of 'fairness' which seemed to involve the idea of institutions. Here is a short note on fairness. 
The concept of fairness "Exactly what constitutes fairness will depend on the specific nature of the decision process or institution in question. Consider, for example, a fair trial, a fair contest, a fair grade, a fair price, a fair agreement, a fair election. This variety of contexts entails a corresponding range of criteria of fairness. All of these, however, generally center on equal treatment of people, with departures from equality requiring justification....Aristotle makes the important observation that standards of justice or fairness are different in different regimes. In oligarchical regimes, ruled over by the rich, it is thought fair to treat people differently according to their merits, with amount of property constituting degree of merit. In democratic regimes, in contrast, it is considered fair to treat people alike--and so to distribute political offices through a lottery system--with free birth and citizenship constituting being alike (Book V, Chap. 1) An important lesson of Aristotle's discussion is that there is no universally recognized standard of fair treatment, in terms of either procedures or distribution. Different ways of dealing with people can plausibly be represented as fair, as long as they treat people who are similar in important respects similarly....Much of the attention "fairness" has received in recent years is because of the work of John Rawls and his theory of "justice as fairness." "

Two on numbers

an anthropogist on the invention of numbers "I think the most likely scenario is one of coevolution. You develop numbers that allow you to trade in more precise ways. As that facilitates things like trade and agriculture, that puts pressure to invent more numbers. In turn those refined number systems are going to enable new kinds of trade and more precise maps, so it all feeds back on each other. It seems like a chicken and egg situation, maybe the numbers came first but they didn’t have to be there in a very robust form to enable certain kinds of behaviors. It seems like in a lot of cultures once people get the number five, it kickstarts them. Once they realize they can build on things, like five, they can ratchet up their numerical awareness over time. This pivotal awareness of “a hand is five things,” in many cultures is a cognitive accelerant. "
I am suspicious of this argument. Some natural number sense on logarithmic scale seems embedded according to this discussion a few years ago What number is Halfway between 1 and 9? Is it 5 - or 3?
Along the way, there is a discussion of Piranha's sense of numbers, that accounting started before writing etc.

Experiences of an Indian government officer ( in Telugu)

Vadrevu China Veerabhadrudu started as a tribal welfare officer around 1987 and worked in Parvatipuram area which saw a Naxalites supported tribal uprisings during 1967-71. One of my cousins who had a phd. InChemical Engineeringwas involved inthe agitation. In 1970 when I went home on vacation, I was told that he was in jail and visited him inthe Rajahmundry jail. He could not get a job later and became a successful farmer. Vererabhadrudu now is the Additional Director if The Tribal Welfare Department of the A.P. Government and has been revisiting the area. In a Post in his wall he described the changes he has seen. Schools which were derelict at one time are thriving with students and new buildings and he describes some of the schools he visited with some historical asides.
Though India has progressive legislation in many areas, service delivery by all accounts is poor. Some NGOs and occasional helpful government officials have made a difference in some place. One place I visited is Alirajpur district in M.P. and the work there mainly associated with various organizations for which Rahul Banerjee (https://www.facebook.com/rahul.banerjee.146?fref=pb&hc_location=friends_tab&pnref=friends.all and http://anar-kali.blogspot.com.au ) worked. I am not sure what worked in the Parvatipuram area. I will try to get more details from Sri Veerabhadrudu with whom I got acquainted recently and if I get enough details, translate his post.

Khaleeli law

from why some of our most engaging writers are from the Indian Foreign Serrvice
"Whatever else you do or do not do,” Akbar Khaleeli, one of India’s most distinguished diplomats, once told a group of IFS trainees that included a future Foreign Secretary, Ranjan Mathai, adding, “remember never to do anything in poor taste”. Difficult to define, “taste” is unmistakable. It is not about how one looks and seems but what one does in large matters involving policy and national interest and in seemingly “small” matters as well. This adherence to taste may be called the “Khaleeli law”.

When serving as India’s ambassador in Rome, Khaleeli roundly ticked off one of his juniors for not being exactly helpful to an Indian woman who had been suddenly widowed in the Italian capital. “Now, listen. Do not quote rules to me. The point is simple. This woman has lost her husband. She is Indian. We are the Indian embassy. Is it our duty to help her or not?”

I met him a few times during my college days. He was two years senior to me and he seemed a pleasant fellow.more about him here. He had a somewhat strange and finally tragic marriage. It is described in his words here and the Wikipedia about his first wife https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakereh_Khaleeli.

Different versions of democracy

Some political systems handle populism better than others
"One leading taxonomy of political systems is that of Dutch-born political scientist Arend Lijphart, an emeritus professor at the University of California at San Diego. In his classic book “Patterns of Democracy,” Lijphart divides the world’s democracies between consensus systems and majoritarian systems. Consensus democracies tend to have proportional voting, lots of parties and coalition governments. Majoritarian democracies feature two big parties that alternate stints in power........Lijphart finds that, in general, consensus systems deliver better economic results and more voter trust than majoritarian ones."

On improving memory

An old article by Anu Kumar on Akbar discusses ancient techniques
 and a recent article Ancient technique can dramatically improve memory

Ramblings

I rarely loose my keys but I lost them today. After a morning walk I found that I did not have my keys. I thought I must have lost them while taking the handkerchief and retraced my path about one and half times. Then it occurred to me that it was a concrete path and if the keys fell down they would have made a sound. Then I tried to remember when I saw the keys last. It was yesterday when I was watering the plants, our son in law Gavin came to see us. I gave the keys to him and continued watering the plants. So, he must have left them in the house. I came back and they were on the dining table. It seems that I can remember and think a bit. This brings me to the next point.
For a long time, I felt that I have been wasting my time after retiring. Most of the time is spent in reading theories which lead nowhere. May be one should help some underprivileged by doing some actual work. The problem is lack of experience and sometimes one can do harm by trying to do good stuff. One may cause disruptions or raise unnecessary hopes. The easiest thing would be to contribute somewhere taking the advice of people in the field. I finally came to the conclusion that helping teach middle school children somewhere in india with some concepts, homework, preparations for examinations etc helping teachers who are already teaching them may be what I can do. So after some time I found some possibilities around Ongole and I plan to spend 2-3 months there every year for the next few years. Meanwhile Ramarao Kanneganti is looking at other possible schools. It may come down to wandering around various schools or slowly finding one place where I can fit in. So the destination is Ongole this November. Many institutions now are parts of various chains, one may be contributing to status quo.

Doing mathematics again

 Trying to rewrite what I was doing last year, I found that I did not understand it any more. It took a few weeks to get in to it again. The main problem seems to be getting started. I am not sure why I am still doing mathematics. May be the old unresolved problems are unconsciously bothering me still. One advantage seems to be that other things look easier though the methodology and experience with mathematics is probably not suitable for thinking about other things apart from noting some logical inconstinencies.

Ravi Varma

I came across these two posts about Ravi Varma, the first about the early influences of painters from Naik kingdoms who migrated to Kerala: Ravi Varma and Ramaswamy Naicker-The rivalry
and the Bombay phase and some of the faces which appeared in his paintings as well as the commercial aspects of his work Three muses... Both very readable and most of the material new to me and give some glimpses of life in Kerala as well as Bombay during those days. There may be more more posts in the blog about Ravi Varma. Ravi Varma faces were a part of our growing up since we saw them all the time on posters, calendars and pictures at home. It was so common place that I did not pay much attention to the phenomenon.

A discussion about group-IQ

Whether and how much it depends on the IQs of individual members and the composition of the group like the presence of females and sensitivity of group members. In the discussion, some of the members of the original papers which did not agree with each other participate.
Perverse Incentives and Replication in Science a post of Steven HSU at information Processing.
See also the discussion at Economist's View http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2017/03/on-perverse-incentives-and-replication-in-science.html
"Stephen Hsu has a nice blog post on this topic. He writes about this common pattern:

1. Study reports results which reinforce the dominant, politically correct, narrative.
2. Study is widely cited in other academic work, lionized in the popular press, and used to advance real world agendas.
3. Study fails to replicate, but no one (except a few careful and independent thinkers) notices.

#1 is spot-on for economics. Woe be to she who bucks the dominant narrative. In economics, something else happens. Following the study, there are 20 piggy-back papers which test for the same results on other data. The original authors typically get to referee these papers, so if you're a young researcher looking for a publication, look no further. You've just guaranteed yourself the rarest of gifts -- a friendly referee who will likely go to bat for you. Just make sure your results are similar to theirs. If not, you might want to shelve your project, or else try 100 other specifications until you get something that "works". One trick I learned: You can bury a robustness check which overturns the main results deep in the paper, and your referee who is emotionally invested in the benchmark result for sure won't read that far.

Hsu then writes:

"one should be highly skeptical of results in many areas of social science and even biomedical science (see link below). Serious researchers (i.e., those who actually aspire to participate in Science) in fields with low replication rates should (as a demonstration of collective intelligence!) do everything possible to improve the situation. Replication should be considered an important research activity, and should be taken seriously""

Igor Shafarevich RIP

David Mumford writes about Nationalism and longing to belong, with best regards to Igor Shafrevich

One more on divergence

"Outside Europe, the institutions of apprenticeship were far less effective. Kinship relations still dominated many other economies, especially China (Greif and Tabellini 2017). While guilds existed in the Ottoman world, India, and in China, we have found no evidence that they did much more than secure exclusionary rents by prohibiting non-members from entering their industries. Apprenticeship remained largely a family or sectarian affair. This is not to deny that kinship relations remained important in Western Europe as well – but in economic history, degree is everything. Recent work trying to understand the Industrial Revolution and the Great Enrichment that followed it has increasingly focused on upper-tail human capital (Mokyr 2009, Squicciarini and Voigtländer 2015, de la Croix and Licandro 2015). In that story, the human capital of top-level artisans and the way it was produced played a larger role than has been realised so far." from 
More than family matters: Apprenticeship and the rise of Europe
See also discussion in Naked Capitalism
Related on tacit knowledge
Some possible sources of tacit knowledge natural experiments

Another of Rahul Banerjee's experience

Rahul Banerjee is a IIT Khargur graduate who started working for the tribals soon after his degree in eighties. Since then he has built a base in Alirajpur district of M.P. from agitations ( against the Narmada dam and went to jail a few times for his activities) to building self help groups. At some stage, he married a Dalit day and they continue their work together and some times independently. She is working for Ph.D. And also trying to build a residential school for handicapped tribal children. He makes a living now by writing reports for various organisations on sewage, water management  etc.Some of his experiences are chronicled in a book reviewed here. I have known about his work for about ten years and met him twice, once for about a week and travelled with him in the area of his work with Bhils. He is a deeply read and thoughtful man and also good at practical work from sewage management at home and schools to arranging for wifi and solar power.
Here is one of his recent experiences from his Wall:
"Today, while I was going to the market village in Udainagar to get some steel for the centre we are building on Subhadra's farm, an Adivasi woman I know, hitched a ride. She said she was going to exchange her old brass utensil for a new one. I said that wouldn't take much time so I would go along with her and after she did her exchange we would get the steel also and come back. The old utensil weighed 1.65 kg and the new one she chose weighed 1.85 kg. The merchant who is also a moneylender, as is usual in Adivasi areas, said that she would have to pay Rs 690 over and above the old utensil she was exchanging. All this while I was sitting in the car but since the woman didn't have that much money she came to me and asked me whether I could lend her Rs 200. I asked her what was the price being asked and became suspicious. So I got down and went to the merchant and asked him what the prices of the old utensil and the new utensil were per kg and he said Rs 250 and Rs 450 respectively. I did a quick calculation and found that she would have to pay Rs 520 and not Rs 690 and told the merchant as much. He then said that a tax of 12% would apply on the purchase of the new utensil. This was another red herring because for unbilled transactions throughout india no taxes are paid. Nevertheless I did a net search and found that the VAT in Madhya Pradesh for brass utensils is only 5% and also the price of new brass utensils was only Rs 400 per kg. The merchant then said that the least he could give the utensil for was 600 and the Adivasi woman was ready to give that amount but since she had only Rs 500 she still had to borrow Rs 100 from me. I told her I wasn't going to lend her money so she could get fleeced in this way. She then said that it didn't matter and she would pay Rs 500 and pay the rest Rs 100 later. With that we parted ways with her happy with her brass and I went for my steel!!"

My remarks: There may be various local dependencies for the compromise but my feel is that is how things work at many levels. The moneylender may be making similar payments to banks or local protection rackets. These things build up in chains, act like centrifugal force forcing wealth upwards. That is fine as long as many are not living at subsistence level where any emergency can be disastrous. Perhaps technology enhanced  the centrifugal force until it is difficult enhance it further. That is when artificially inflating asset prices starts taking place and the various indices of inequality start increasing. And things start breaking down somewhere or other.

Some good stories

I know from personal experience that people like Rahul Banerjee made huge difference to number people. Particularly tribals in Alirajpur District of Madhya Pradesh. Here are two more stories which give some hope.
Two doctors who transformed one of Maharashtra's poorest regions Ravindranath and Smita Kohle

Prakash Kaur Bibimbap: Rescuing India's ababdoned girls

Programmed to fail

Utopia Inc. from Aeon:"Why then do utopian communities so often fail? Interestingly, attrition rates for intentional communities are not all that different from many other types of human endeavour. The failure rate for start-ups is around 90 per cent, and the longevity of most companies is dismal: of the Fortune 500 companies listed in 1955, more than 88 per cent are gone; meanwhile, S&P companies have an average lifespan of just 15 years. Can we really expect more longevity from experimental communities? And if not, what can we learn from an audit of these experiments? What have been the key factors undermining communitarian living?"

Another article by William Dalrymple on Ajanta

Which I missed and in which he discusses the work of Gregory Schopen ( whose work was linked before Putting the hump in Indian Budhism) The greatest ancient picture gallery:
"Schopen shows how the inscriptions left at Buddhist sites tend to record a far less idealized picture of life in early Buddhist India than the later documents that have been the foundational texts of modern Buddhist scholarship. He points out, for example, that Buddhist monks, far from being the otherworldly creatures often imagined by Western scholars, were frequently extremely worldly and “men of considerable wealth,” running businesses and mints; many were clearly sleeping around, lending money, and writing treatises on such unexpected subjects as inheritance law, medicine, and eroticism; some were even getting into sectarian fights, hoarding weapons, destroying the stupas of rival orders, and abusing and occasionally trying to murder nuns. They were, in other words, not saints but normal human beings."

About food wastage, again

There is a simple way to improve the world’s food systems

In praise of cash

if plastic replaces cash, much that is good will be lost
"If we are going to refer to bank payments as ‘cashless’, we should then refer to cash payments as ‘bankless’. Because that’s what cash is, and right now it is the only thing standing between us and a completely privatised money system."

Internet connectivity problems in india

Need internet to buy PDS rations? Go climb a tree:
"Instead of making life easier, the government's move to digitalise+ the Public Distribution System has added to the misery of residents of several backward areas, especially Kotra. There are 76 ration centres here of which 13 have very poor connectivity.

At these places, ration dealers have to climb on trees to find internet connectivity to use their PoS machines. People living in small settlements like Merpur, Chibarwadi, Malwiya Khakariya, Peepla, Bhuridebar, Beran, Palcha, Umariya, Samoli have to wait daily for hours to get the


"The only ration shop is many miles from our home but the ration dealer camps on a hilltop which is even far away. Sometimes, it takes 4-5 hours to find even a thin trace of internet network and only then the machine works. The earlier system was better," said Bhola Gameti, a resident."

Debraj Ray on Arrow

here. Debraj seems to have interacted with Arrow from 80s onwards. Before him in the sixties, another Indian who interacted with Arrow was Bagicha Minhas. I met both Debraj and Minhas in ISI Delhi Centre. Both seemed brilliant and of different generations and I am not sure how much they interacted with each other. I was working in pure mathematics most of the time though I gave some mathematics talks to the economists due to the insistence of V.K.Chetty. Debraj' article has the following quote about Minhas:

"Joan Robinson on Bagicha Minhas and the CES production function: “It is a sad comment on the state of our education that a talented young man be brought from India to be bamboozled like this.” "
There is one version of how this came out in the book 
Rumination of a gadfly by Deena Khatkhate which I have not read. The book promises to be interesting, a review here
The post by Debraj Ray has the following quote from a lecture of Arrow;
"“[I interpreted] neoclassical economic theory and particularly the then new and rapidly developing discipline of welfare economics as pointing to an ideal efficient economy rather than the actual one, marked both by massive unemployment and by monopolistic distortion… In true Hegelian fashion, capitalist instability and the socialist counterattack seemed to be synthesized: it seemed possible to have an economy that retained much of capitalist drive and initiative and yet gave room for the government to intervene to avoid at least the worst inefficiencies of unemployment and the idling of other resources. I accepted provisionally what seemed to be a widespread consensus in the euphoria of postwar economic growth. The state had an active role to play in maintaining effective demand and in dealing with the many imperfections of the market system revealed by theoretical welfare economics — the overcoming of market failures and monopoly and the realization of economies of scale…
I have spoken of a provisional acceptance. I still felt it important to explore more deeply the possibility that socialism was a superior possibility. I was more aware of the complexities of operation of a socialist system and sought to develop more deeply the theory of such a system. I also sought to explore more fully the criteria for a democratic social organization… [Today,] the apparent pause in economic growth, the crisis in stabilization policy occasioned by the current inflationary threats and realities, and the loss of purpose in redistributional measures all combine to raise anew the question of alternatives to capitalism.”
Yes, Arrow did make a cautious case for socialism. To me, it was particularly interesting that in the end, the case was made not on the positive grounds of inevitable destruction of the capitalist system, but rather on the normative grounds that such a system could be rife with inefficiencies and unequal treatment."

The mighty five

which may replace China as the world's factory:"China, the United States, and Germany are currently among the most 15 globally competitive manufacturing countries in the world. But in the next five years, according to a survey of industry CEOs carried out by Deloitte, the MITI-V of Malaysia, India, Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam are set to enter the top 15 most competitive manufacturing countries. They are the “new China,” the top economies for low-cost manufacturing (i.e., labor intensive commodity type products like apparel, toys, textiles and basic consumer electronics)."

Cost of drugs keeps growing in spite of generic drugs

at least in USA "According to some measures, such as the share of generics in the sales of molecules that have lost patent protection, this policy has been a great success (see Ellison et al. 1997, Berndt 2002, or Grabowski et al. 2014, who show that the market share of an originator drug typically drops below 20% after one year). Furthermore, the number of molecules facing generic competition has also soared since the early 2000s (Aitken et al. 2013).

And yet, spending on drugs keeps growing. For instance, Conti et al. (2015) report that “total US prescription drug spending rose 13% in 2014 [alone],” with increases reaching 31% in some market segments, e.g. for cancer drugs."

The mechanism seems to be "The mechanism we identify is the relationship between price competition and the amounts invested to promote a molecule. Firms most intensely promote molecules that yield the highest profits. When competition is symmetric, this generally favours the highest quality drugs, which is a desirable feature from the patients’ perspective. Yet, when competition is asymmetric – for example, because one molecule faces generic competition while the other remains patent protected – firms stop promoting their genericised molecule, thus shifting demand away from the cheaper products. Figure 2 depicts this strategic shift very clearly. Firms already start decreasing their promotion 12 quarters before patent expiration, with a marked acceleration right after ‘date 0’."

Demonetization and Growth in India’s GDP

from MR "India’sGDP figures were just released and lo and behold they are great! Quarterly growth for Oct-Dec (demonetization, the banning of 86% of India’s cash, hit on Nov. 8) was 7% on an annual year over year basis. Many analysts and critics had predicted a significant slowdown. Prime Minister Modi took the opportunity to take a dig at economists like Amartya Sen who had sharply criticized demonetization saying “Hard work is more important than what Harvard thinks.” (Sen teaches at Harvard). Modi’s BJP party also seems to be doing well in the important elections in Uttar Pradesh suggesting a second term for him."
A more Detailed report expresses doubts apart from the doubts about data:Basically, and to continue the update, the main idea here is not that the GDP figures are being fiddled, but that either the impact from demonetisation was not as severe as expected, that there are unique reasons such as cash in hand or inventory buildupsexplaining the elevated figure, or that official statistics are failing to capture the negative growth effects on the informal sector — which accounts for about 40 per cent of India’s GDP but provides 75 per cent of employment, per the FT.

The questions then are to what extent that will ever be captured in the GDP series or if its weight on the series has been exaggerated by those who expected a lower print.

For what it’s worth, the reporting we’ve done in and around Mumbai, including in textile mills above the city, would seem to confirm that for some industries there has indeed been a massive falloff in demand and a resultant drop in employment.

While small traders in Mumbai say that business is returning, the mill owners we talked to outside the city said they had seen some 80 per cent of their business fall away immediately after demonetisation, and it was only very slowing coming back. Some went further, showing us mothballed machines and suggesting their industry would never fully recover."

"

A new paper on Household Debt

High level household debt hurts growth "".....economic studies have regularly found that high levels of household debt is a negative for economic growth. Moreover, some economists have found a strong relationship between high levels of consumer debt and economic crises. Yet if you read the business press, analysts and government officials see rising consumer borrowing as a plus for growth. How does that make sense?" discusses a new paper from International Bank of Settlements.

Denmark reduces food waste by 25 percent

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/denmark-reduce-food-waste-25-per-cent-five-years-help-selina-juul-scandanavia-a7604061.html
"A woman has been credited by the Danish Government for single-handedly helping the country reduce its food waste by 25 per cent in just five years.

Selina Juul, who moved from Russian to Denmark when she was 13 years old, was shocked by the amount of food available and wasted at supermarkets."
Another report
Two strategies we use are1) go before closing times and often prices are cheaper, and 2) buy in bulk and share with other families.

Some quotes from people of Indian origin

While searching for a film song, I came across some writings of Ramarao Kanneganti, a professional of Indian origin working in US. He says in one of the pieces:
"Now, where were we? We are talking about how people in the US are non-professionals. What I argued is that several non-professionals here are more capable than the professionals back home. And, I also argued that the “professionals back home” are not really professionals."
Aparna Krishnan, who has been working in a village for some time, in summary of some of her discussions http://paalaguttapalle.blogspot.com.au/2016/09/fb-discussions-i5-year-old-iits-and.html says;
"The best farming lessons come from Annasamy anna and Siddiah, and not IARI. The best lessons on sociology are learnt by living in a village, and not from JNU ! "
Rahul Banerjee in http://anar-kali.blogspot.com.au/2017/02/the-irrelevance-of-our-technological.html?spref=fb says:
"I have now come to think that not only my alma mater but all technological institutes in this country are indeed dedicated to the vice of the nation which is the promotion of consumerist capitalism!! Actually the nation itself is not a homogeneous entity. As we know these days it is very much contested with multiple definitions of nation and nationalism resulting in continuous conflict of murderous proportions. Generally, the downtrodden majority do not even have a conception of nation and are too caught up in making two ends meet. The elite take advantage of this to distort the agenda of development of this country and nowhere is it more visible than in the irrelevance of our technological institutes. "
P.S. I think that two of them studied in IITs and one in IISc.

Gandhiji's speech at IISc, Bangalore. July 12, 1927.

Gandhiji's speech at IISc, Bangalore. July 12, 1927.

"I was wondering where do I come in? There is no place here for a rustic like me who was to stand speechless in awe and wonderment. I am not in a mood to say much. All I can say is, that all these huge laboratories and electrical apparatus you see here are due to the labour, unwilling and forced, of millions. For Tata’s thirty lakhs did not come from outside, nor does the Mysore contribution come from anywhere else but this begar-1 world. If we are to meet the villages and to explain to them, how we are utilizing their money on buildings and plants which will never benefit them, but might perhaps benefit their posterity, they will not understand it. They will turn a cold shoulder. But we never take them into our confidence, we take it as a matter of right, and forget, that the rule of ‘no taxation without representation’, applies to them too. If you will really apply it to them, and realize your responsibility to render them an account, you will see that there is another side to all these appointments. You will then find not a little but a big corner in your hearts for them, and if you will keep it in a good nice condition, you will utilize your knowledge for the benefit of the millions on whose labour your education depends. I shall utilize the purse you have given me for Daridranarayan. The real Daridranarayan even I have not seen, but know only through my imagination. Even the spinners who will get this money are not the real Daridranarayan who live in remote corners of distant villages which have yet to be explored. I was told by your professor, that the properties of some of the chemicals will take years of experiments to explore. But who will try to explore villages? Just as some of the experiment in your laboratories go on for all the twenty-four hours, let the big corner in your heart remain perpetually warm for the benefit of the poor millions.

I expect far more from you than from the ordinary man in the street. Don’t be satisfied with having given the little you have done, and say “We have done what we could, let us now play tennis and billards.” I tell you, in the billiard room and on the tennis court think of the big debt that is being piled against you from day to day. But beggars cannot be choosers. I thank you for what you have given me. Think of the prayer I have made and translate it into action. Don’t be afraid of wearing the cloth the poor women make for you, don’t be afraid of your employers showing you the door if you wear Khadi. I would like you to be men, and stand up before the world firm in your convictions. Let your zeal for the dumb millions be not stifled in the search for wealth. I tell you, you can devise a far greater wireless instrument, which does not require external research, but internal,-and all research will be useless if it is not allied to internal research,-which can link your hearts with those of the millions. Unless all the discoveries that you make have the welfare of the poor as the end in view, all your workshops will be really no better than Satan’s workshops, as Rajagopalachari said in joke. Well, I have given you enough food for thought, if you are in a reflective mood, as all research students ought to be."
Via Aparna Krishnan in https://www.facebook.com/rahul.banerjee.146?fref=pb&hc_location=friends_tab&pnref=friends.all
The speech can be found here around page 244 http://www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/voice_of_truth.pdf

Guge

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TAyN5rzwRMU&feature=youtu.be

 A new book Guge:Ages of gold https://youtu.be/MXprFk95taM
A review of David Schulman Submerged in the cosmic kingdom. Excerpt:
"Duality is our ingrained habit, antimonies and polarities the foundation of thought itself. From its earliest beginnings, Buddhism has had an empirical and skeptical streak; the Buddha is said to have told his disciples, “Don’t take my words on faith; experiment on yourselves.” But our default awareness is hardly luminous with insight; if you’re like me, you live mostly in an encompassing fog. So whaT are we to do? Will we ever taste the truth?......

So if you are wondering what it might feel like to turn yourself into Vairocana, a dense yet empty mass of light and sound, also defined as insight, that is the stuff of all reality as well as our only means of hearing and seeing what is real—you could start by opening this book."
But the book is expensive, about 60 American dollars.

Maps

The map of mathematics

New jobs

The jobs Americans do

suddenly remembered this old song

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-7Y0ekr-3So

One on fasting

Fasting diet 'regenerates diabetic pancreas' from BBC Health

Two articles on India's demonetisation

India's bold experiment with cash from Naked Capitalism
India's short road to crisis from Jacobin Magazine

Stories of some passengers in Indian Railways

https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=fWvoCicq9eo&t=36GENERAL
"The Unreserved is an inquiry into the lives of passengers who use the Unreserved Compartment, the cheapest way to travel across India on the Indian Railways system. The film portrays the passengers’ aspirations, efforts and opinions through conversations and personal stories. "

Kenneth Arrow RIP

not many tributes are coming from main stream ecomists, perhaps due to the dubious status of general equilibrium theory, of which he is one of the contributors and won Nobel Prize for it.
Here is one in a series of four The greatest living economist has passed away:Notes on Kenneth Arrow Part1This part is about 'Srroe's Impossibilty Theorem' and the author says "The conditions I gave above for Arrow’s Theorem are actually different from the 5 conditions in the original 1950 paper. The reason is that Arrow’s original proof is actually incorrect, as shown by Julian Blau in a 1957 Econometrica. The basic insight of the proof is of course salvageable."
Another by Bill Black in Naked Capitalism Kenneth Arrow's ( Ignored) Impossibilty Theorem is about General equilibrium theory, and elaborates on a quote of an obituary in NYTimes:
"[Arrow] made clear, his powerful conclusions about the workings of competitive markets held true only under ideal — that is to say, unrealistic — assumptions.

His assumptions, for example, ruled out the existence of third-party effects: The sale of a product by Harry to Joe was assumed not to affect the well-being of Sally — an assumption routinely violated in the real world by, for example, the sale of products that harm the environment."  And goes on to say 

"Arrow was brilliant and well meaning. We celebrate his life and mourn his passing. The opportunity cost to our field is how much he could have accomplished had his research not been so distorted by neoclassical dogma."
From an interview last year "Arrow himself has embraced many of the criticisms made against the general equilibrium theory, calling it “empirically falsified.” Over the years he has made further contributions to the theory, incorporating into it such elements as uncertainty and allocation of risk for the first time." https://promarket.org/there-is-regulatory-capture-but-it-is-by-no-means-complete/
P.S. More on general equilibrium theory https://afinetheorem.wordpress.com/2017/02/27/kenneth-arrow-part-ii-the-theory-of-general-equilibrium/
"But it does mean that individual rationality as the sole paradigm of economic analysis is dead: it is mathematically proven that postulates of individual rationality will not allow us to say anything of consequence about economic aggregates or game theoretic outcomes in the frequent scenarios where we do not have a unique equilibria with a well-defined way to get there (via learning in games, or a tatonnament process in GE, or something of a similar nature).  Arrow himself(1986, J. Business) accepts this: “In the aggregate, the hypothesis of rational behavior has in general no implications.” This is an opportunity for economists, not a burden, and we still await the next Arrow who can guide us on how to proceed."

Michael Hudson

posted this before. Posting again from Naked Capitaliam for the discussion Michael Hudson: Why Failing to Solve Personal Debt and Polarization Will Usher in a New Dark Age

Global and local citizens

"But what happens when the welfare of local residents comes into conflict with the wellbeing of foreigners – as it often does? Isn’t disregard of their compatriots in such situations precisely what gives so-called cosmopolitan elites their bad name?"
Says Dani Rodrik in recent article.
People like me have benefited from globalisation, travel to different counties for jobs and conferences, and now do not like Brexit or Trump. Our mobility will be affected, finding opportunities for our children from jobs to husbands or wives with a green card and such, and some of us are now suspicious of this democracy, the rule of the mobs. This is what I constantly find from various academics in Ind whose salaries have gone up many more times than the coolies working in the gated institutes they work. Those outside are similar. A progressive writer I know has finally manage an Indian-American husband for her daughter. Apparently dowry was some thing like a hundred crore rupees before dementization but she managed without any discussion of dowry since she is a well-known writer with lots of caste connections in America. Now there are celebrations with guests from various countries arriving in India in fancy dresses. Sort of assertive mating I guess. And do on.
How are the local elites doing? They are either committed Marxists or Amdkarites  or neo-liberals in guise of academics or some name which is popular somewhere in the USA like libertarian. An Ambdkarite wrote, a teacher in a college in Andhra, wrote recently
  "ఒకప్పుడు గొప్ప గొప్ప ఉద్యమాలు టిచెర్లే నిర్మించారు."
meaning that " Once upon a time, all great movements were constructed  by teachers". We are not given any names or numbers or times when this happened. The idea seems to be that if one is an Ambedkarite, one is supposed to react in some way to the local news which was about teaching in local languages in this case I think. Similarly a Marxist of a particular denomination reacts as they assume they are supposed to. No references, no data, no time periods are given. At one time communists were guided by either Moscow or Peking, check for example this article on the communist split A.G. Noorani . Now that there is no guidance, they go by what they are supposed to say.They think they are justified because they are not writing for their benefit but for the benefit of the oppressed.
And so on. Ambedkarites do not have a similar background and many of them seem lost in polemics. There are rare exceptions like D.R.Nagaraj, but none of the current Ambedkarites even mention him.
Now I see local elites of Indian origin Melbourne worrying about how many functions to organise for the marriages of their children and in which countries, the guest lists and so on. Some have money for vacations abroad. Some do not. And they do not mind giving false invoices to get extra commissions. All the time there is talk of corruption in a India and how they are glad to escape the corruption.

Sometimes, I feel that we are all corrupt and there is no hope for this species. We may end with a bang or whimper but many of us will go by either bombs or poverty, and then there may be some regeneration.

Paul Collier on

How to save capitalism from itself via Gulzar Natarajan who highlights some of the points Paul Collier on the future of capitalism-social maternalism grounded on pragmatism?
"Paul Collier  channels Jonathan Tepperman's recipe for successful national transformations from his book The Fix which chronicles ten case studies of national leaders,

eschew ideology; focus on pragmatic solutions to core problems, adjust as you go, but be as tough as is necessary.

The article is good in general, as Collier seeks to chart out a course of capitalism. He identifies "pragmatism" as the new ideology. He advocates the use of tax policies to generate growth - moving away from income-specific to context-specific taxes, that discriminates based on source of income (rents as against innovation), regulatory arbitraging (real economy versus sharing economy), resource misallocation (financial markets versus real economy), geographical privileges (cities as against suburbs and rural areas), etc. "

A poem by Vahar Sonowane

When young a whore
when old a witch
so people say.
People -
people say anything.

A thing, such that
on the road, in the valley
stop her where you find her
embrace her if you wish
leave her if you've had your fill
No call for help, no outcry

The new sari, in it the new daughter-in-law,
falls at the feet of the father-in-law,
grows old and tattered
alongside her sari
and then -
patch on tattered patch
for a lifetime!
Via A revolutionary bard

Himanshu Rai

The story of his two wives and Australian descendants

"The story begins, as many good stories do, in an attic. That’s where 30-something Australian Peter Dietze discovered a black-and-white photograph of a handsome young Indian man. He asked his mother about the picture and was told it was of Himanshu Rai, pioneering founder of Bombay Talkies, legend of the early years of Hindi cinema. And also, Peter’s grandfather."

Robin Hanson on Peter Turchin

Cycles of war&empire

It seems to me that there may be slight misrepresentation. Anyway, I would replace inequality by 'extreme inequality' using some thing like Palma index. 

One of the comments is more to my liking, by 'akarlin' 

"(1) Rising inequality as something associated with fragility was a feature of Malthusian-era economies, but not because of inequality *per se*, but because said inequality was usually the result of Malthusian stresses (and the banal consequences of Ricardo's Law of Rent). Once populations bumped up against the land's carrying capacity, surpluses were very low to non-existent, so shocks such as droughts, a succession crisis, a nomadic incursion, etc. that could have been (and were) weathered easily in the earlier days of the cycle could now instead translate into cascading collapses.

(2) The post-industrial system is a very different ball game and little of the patterns of Malthusian cliodynamics apply to it (for now, anyway... heh)." 

The second part is not clear to me. The crucial problem seems to be that surpluses become low and share of the surpluses to the extent when a large proportion are at the subsistence level .

A site for free books

Accidentally, I came across "The loves of Krishna in Indian paintings and poetry" by W.G. Archer in a list of free books http://www.fullbooks.com/The-Loves-of-Krishna-in-Indian-Painting-and2.html  ( the link to the free books is at the top of the page. Lot of them are old and some obscure and it seems a bit difficult to search the list for any specific book). At one point, it says:
"During the next two hundred years, from the tenth to the twelfth century,
the Krishna story completely alters. It is not that the facts as given in
the _Bhagavata Purana_ are disputed. It is rather that the emphasis and
view-point are changed. Krishna the prince and his consort Rukmini are
relegated to the background and Krishna the cowherd lover brought sharply to the fore. Krishna is no longer regarded as having been born solely to
kill a tyrant and rid the world of demons. His chief function now is to
vindicate passion as the symbol of final union with God. "

Cosma Shalizi on Ernest Gellner's view of nationalism

"Even if Gellner was talking utter rubbish, Nations and Nationalism would be worth reading simply for his style, a trademark Bertrand-Russell-meets-Grucho-Marx combination of powerful logic working from very general premises and laugh-out-loud (literally) wit. Unfortunately for those of us notenamoured of nationalism, he wasn't talking rubbish at all." from 
Nations and Nationalism
More Er est Gellner, 1925--1995