Density is destiny

Density is destiny; economists predict the far future :”If we look around the world today we see that the places with the densest populations, such as China and India, are poor. But in the long-run of history that doesn’t make sense. As Paul Romer, and others, have emphasized, ideas are the ultimate source of wealth and more people means more ideas. As a result, innovation and GDP per capita should be higher in places and times with more people. The fact that China and India are poor today is an out-of-equilibrium anomaly that happened because they were slower than the West to adopt the institutions of free markets and capitalism necessary to leverage ideas into output. China and India weren’t relatively poor in the past, however, and they won’t be relatively poor in the future.” I am not so sure. It may be more like crabs in a bucket.

Temporary scientists

Science, small groups and stochasticity via Marginal Revolution post The rise of temporary scientist

About the current situation in India

AboutGauri Lankesh by Rolli Romig. The incubation from Gujarati explained by a judge, Himanshu Trivedi, who quit after the riots. “In a phone interview with Scroll.in from Auckland, New Zealand, Trivedi revealed details about his experiences during and after the communal riots that shook his faith in the justice system: he not only witnessed police complicity in the attack on Muslims, but also saw lawyers and judges display extremely prejudiced opinions.” From I was sick of the hateful climate in Gujarat: judge explains why he quit after the riots. My feel that this sort of feeling is common all over India .

Two on rents

Berlin’s grassroots plan to renationalise up to 200,000 ex-council homes from corporate landlords
Gentrification Is a Feature, Not a Bug, of Capitalist Urban Planning

Niti and dharma

‘This country has seen the conflict between ecclesiastical law and secular law long before Europeans sought to challenge the authority of the Pope. Kautilya’s Arthash ̄astra lays down the foundation of secular law. In India unfortunately ecclesiastical law triumphed over secular law. In my opinion this was the one of the greatest disasters in the country’.
—B.R. Ambedkar
Beginning quote of the interesting paper “Notes on Political Thought in Medieval and Early Modern South India” byVelcheru  Narayanarao and Sanjay Subrahmanyam downloadable at Academia.edu
Abstract
This essays deals with a neglected and significant strand of Indian political thought by describing and analysing the corpus known as n ̄ıti in the context of medieval and early modern South India (in particular with reference to the Telugu-speaking region). Works of n ̄ıti are presented here within a larger context, as they evolve from the medieval Andhra of the Kakatiyas into the Vijayanagara period, the Nayakas, and beyond. They are also opposed and contrasted to other texts written within the broad category of dharmash ̄astra, which seem to deal with a far more conservative project for the management of society and politics within a caste-based framework. Authors and compilers dealt with include Baddena and Madiki Singana, but also the celebrated emperor-poet Krishnadevaraya (r. 1509–29). An argument is made for the continued relevance of these texts for the conduct of politics in South Asia, into and beyond the colonial period.

D.D.Kosambi and Benjamin Franklin

starting from different directions predict similar futures for their respective countries. D.D.Kosambi seems to see the possibility of a ‘strong man’ in India starting from some ideas of Marx (via Swapan Bhattacharjee). From a completely different direction Benjamin Franklin saw the possibility of despots in America. “But just as the Indian bourgeoisie imports the latest foreign machinery for production, so, when all else fails, the latest capitalist developments in politics will also be imported. And this means fascism, in the long run the only possible alternative to socialism. Already the talk in circles that count is of the need for a "strong man." And models are at hand, from nearby Thailand to faraway Egypt and Guatemala.” from On the class structure of India. BenjaminFranklin’s words at the Constitutional Convention onSeptember 17, 1787 at the age of 81:“ … for having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought were right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that the older I grow the more apt I am to doubt my own judgement, and to pay more respect to the judgement ofothers. Most men indeed as well as most sects in religion, think themselves in possession of all truth,and that wherever others differ from them it is so fare rror….”
He goes on to say:“… I agree to this Constitution, with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general government necessary for us, there is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered; and I believe further that this is likely to be well administered for several years, and can only end in despotism as other forms before it,when people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.”

Work of GV Ramanjaneyulu on sustainable agriculture

This Man Gave up an IRS Job to Sow The Seeds of Change in 7000 Villages, 30 Lakh Acres!:
“And so, the Centre of Sustainable Agriculture (CSA) was formed to propagate sustainable agricultural practices, that would not only pull distressed farmers out of perpetual poverty but also create a model that could be scaled, through the support of state governments.

From 2005 to 2008, they partnered with the Society for Elimination of Rural Poverty, (SERP), the then Government of Andhra Pradesh, which is a federation of women self-help groups. Training women farmers for 45 weeks over two seasons through Farmer Field Schools (FFS), they helped propagate Non-Pesticidal Management (NPM). This led to freeing over 30 lakh acres of land from chemical pesticides across 7,000 villages.” And an interview in Telugu.

https://youtu.be/h8A3zTT3VCs

Becoming

See a salamander grow from a single cell from National Geographic

Indigenous entrepreneur

‘Seed Mother’ who never went to school has lessons for scientists

Haiti and Venezuela

How the U.S. Is Strangling Haiti as It Attempts Regime Change in Venezuela :”Since 2007, Venezuela had provided $4 billion in oil through Petrocaribe.

The debt that Venezuela had, in the long-term thinking of Chávez, was because of something that happened in 1815. The first president of the Republic of Haiti, Alexandre Pétion, gave Simón Bolivar sanctuary and armed him to return and liberate Gran Colombia (the vast northern lands of South America). Bolivar had promised Pétion that he would emancipate the enslaved Africans in Gran Colombia. This is what he did. Without Pétion’s demand and Bolivar’s victory, Chávez—whose ancestors had been enslaved—said on a visit to Haiti in 2007, “I would not be here.”

Haiti’s Debt to the West

No such generosity has come from the West. In fact, from the first fires of Haiti’s revolution, Western powers—from France to the United States—have attempted to destroy the Haitian republic. In 1804, France forced Haiti to agree to pay it $21 billion for the “theft” of enslaved Africans and others. It took Haiti till 1947 to pay off this odious, disgusting debt. France has never apologized for it. Nor has Citibank, which made billions off the payments. Neither France nor Citibank has considered replaying the inhumane plunder.

Venezuela’s generosity was not matched by any Western country or financial institution. Instead, the West piled on debt upon debt onto Haiti. Even the “assistance” given during the 2010 earthquake made Western companies money.”
More on Haiti Haiti still pays the price for having fought slavery 

The forest whisperer

The woodsman who's revealing the secret lives of trees “He wrote the book “The Hidden Life of Trees” in 2015, spelling out the communication patterns of the forest, how tree families support new generations, and their strategies to fight predators such as moss, lichen and fungi.”

A selection of articles on MMT

MMT streetfighting of which I tried reading MMT for Dummies  by Edward Harrison : “ Every single controversy involving MMT revolves around this one concept - boosting demand with new spending or by cutting taxes, and thus ballooning the deficit -- and doing so without seeming to worry about the deficit consequences. Even 'Keynesians' say you have to worry about the consequences of deficits, less now than at other times; but you still have to worry.“

Aruna Tella is 63 today

copied this from a Facebook post of  vs Kumar:
కష్టజీవి కి కేరాఫ్ అడ్రస్
వంట పనివరలకు నీడనిచ్చిన చెట్టు
హక్కుల ఉద్యమాలకు ఊపిరి
స్త్రీ హక్కుల సారధి
అభాగ్యులకు అమ్మ...   మా అరుణక్క

జన్మదిన శుభాకాంక్షలు..  కుమార్.

A world without clouds

A world without clouds can result in extreme global warming.

Two about Gina Rippon

Meet the neuroscientist shattering the myth of the gendered brain

https://youtu.be/SBs0HbHKWyY

Two on knitting

About Volcker years Other people’s blood :
“Teeters, also the first woman on the Fed board, told journalist William Greider that “None of these guys has ever sewn anything in his life.””

The calming effects of sewing can help people express and heal themselves 

Hunnic wars (India)

HANS BAKKER: MONUMENTS OF HOPE, GLOOM, AND GLORY IN THE AGE OF THE HUNNIC WARS. 50 YEARS THAT CHANGED INDIA (484 - 534)
From the abstract:
“The period 484 – 534 was a violent and perturbing one, in which the Gupta Empire crumbled and the political map of northern India was redrawn. At the same time, state-sponsored devotion to Viṣṇu gave way to royal worship of Śiva. The deadly confrontation ‘with rude and cruel kings of the present Kali age, who delight in viciousness’ gave rise to a resilient spirit that found expression in art, religion and Sanskrit literature.“

Economics after neoliberalism

Economics after neoliberalism by Suresh Naidu, Dani Rodrik and Gabriel Zucman.

The end of wonderful blog

 BLOG HIATUS, A RARE SIMKIE PHOTO, AND DISTINGUISHING KUCHIPUDI

The kiss

Adharam madhuram cultural? “In 2015, Justin Garcia, a research scientist at Indiana University's Kinsey Institute, launched an ethnographic study of 168 cultures across the globe and discovered that only 46 per cent of them practise romantic kissing – that is, via prolonged, open-mouthed, lip-to-lip contact.” from The Age.

Michael Hudson on Venezuela

with a discussion of forward markets along the way Michael Hudson on the problems in Venezuela

Good fences: a study of Switzerland and Yugoslavia

Good Fences: The Importance of Setting Boundaries for Peaceful Coexistence

Michael Hudson on Trump

If Michael Hudson is correct, Trump seems to be doing what one hoped: Trump’s brilliant strategy to dismember US dollar hegemony. David Isenberg from Cato Institute suggests strategies What America can’t win wars.

Pardesi songs

Discussed in Songs of Yore Romancing Romancing the Pardesi. My comment at number 22 in the comments.

David Glaesner on the causes of Great Depression

https://uneasymoney.com/2019/01/23/friedman-and-schwartz-eichengreen-and-temin-hawtrey-and-cassel/ Check the comments too.

Old Telugu Songs avaIlable again

at Eemata http://eemaata.com/oldtelugusongs/ 

Indian bureaucracy

A recent article talks of 'India's socially embedded bureaucratic violence.' That reminded me of my recent experiences with Indian bureaucracy. For a few years, I have been taking interest in an organisation which works on women's welfare and is funded by the government. Generally, the funding is late by an year or two and some of the organisers take loans at the rate of two rupees ( for hundred for one month) or above to get by while waiting for the funds. Sometimes bribes help but the reasons for the delay are not clear except for some bloody mindedness of some of the officials involved. I met recently a.p. Commissioner for women's welfare through an IAS contact from college days. The money was already sent by the central government to the state government and people have already been waiting for months for the funds. The procedures kept changing and after several weeks and requests for information already sent, the sanctioned money was cleared to be sent. Then now for several weeks, the cheques are waiting for the signature of the commissioner. I met the commissioner on October 8 of last year and it is not clear what is causing the delay except bloody mindedness on the part of some of the officials. Long ago when the money was still coming from the central government, some of the organisers were fed up and tried to use RTI to inquire out the delay which just caused further delay. And the organisers resign themselves to the fact that money has to come some time and meanwhile keep borrowing money at high interests.

P.S. Compare this with my recent Australian experience. My pension payments were stopped in December while I was in India. Since I was coming back soon I did not worry but casually wrote to the superannuation organisation without expecting any response and did not check my mail. After coming here I found that they already sent the information with in two days of my asking and the whole matter was settled in two days after I came back. Apparent,y I did not update some needed information after 2016. I still do not what it is and will try to find out one of these days.

P.S.2: This was my Facebook post a few days ago. I learnt yesterday, the central government withdrew the funds because the funds were not distributed in time ( though the central government itself used to delay the funds up to one to two years). I understand that the state dept for women’ welfare has requested for unfreezing the funds. May be there will be some improvements in this case.

Trip to India

I was in Ongole for three months and could not access to post on this blog. I am back in Melbourne.

on poverty

If the soul is ignored long enough, the body rebels by Sriram Shamasunder, MD, DTM&H is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine at UCSF, and co-founder of Heal Initiative. He has worked extensively in Rwanda, Liberia, Haiti, Burundi and India. Recently, he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship where he studied implementation in resource-poor tribal areas in rural India. In 2010, he was named an Asia 21 fellow as well as the Northern California Young Physician of the Year. 
The decline in America’s rural health system and its effect on my family by Sarah Smarsh

On Iran sanctions

Why India cannot join “As much as Indians like to promote the virtues of the country’s services-led development model, the Iranian sanctions reveal an Achilles’ heel. If you’re dependent on importing crude from a sanctions-threatened country to fuel your economy, you’d best have some goods of your own to exchange for it.”

Read more at:
//economictimes.indiatimes.com

On MMT

On the rock-star appeal of modern monetary theory
An old article but Tyler Cowen links it again and there are some comments.

Off for a while

i am visiting India again for three months again and blogging will be sparse if at all. The aim is to interact with high school students about their mathematics home work. I will also spend a week with Mahan Mj in TIFR discussing JSJ decompositions.

Chevron-Ecuador saga continues

Ecuador will be forced to pay economic reparations to the oil giant. The over 30,000 affected people in the Amazon haven't received any compensation.
More of the background in the articles here
Discussion at Naked Capitalism 

Ramachandra Guha has a new book on Gandhi

Here is an interview about it ish that Gandhi must be excommunicated, says Ramachandra Guha. I think Gandhi was complex personality and has been inconsistent. An excerpt:
"He engaged with people like Ambedkar, the Hindu orthodoxy he refuses to engage with beyond a point because he sees them as absolutely bigoted and benighted. From the perspective of 2018, you'll be told by the admirers of Ambedkar that Gandhi was moving too slowly in dismantling the caste system. But from the perspective of 1928, the main challenge to Gandhi was from the Hindu Right, which told him he was going too fast; that untouchability is part of our scriptures and how dare a bania like you who doesn't know any Sanskrit tell us how to manage our faith? You recognise Gandhi's dilemma only when you place the modernist critics like Ambedkar on the one side and the Shankaracharyas on the other. Hindu orthodoxy was totally opposed to him. The Shankaracharyas tell the British that Gandhi must be excommunicated. The Hindu Mahasabha ensures that he is met with black flags everywhere he goes as part of his tour against untouchability. He had to negotiate his path with great skill; it takes colossal courage to confront the entire might of your religious institutions. As he gets more assured about his control over the national movement on the Hindu social mind, he becomes more critical and radical in his approach to caste. So it's unfair to criticise Gandhi for being incremental in his approach to caste, because he has to deal with the bulk of Hindu orthodoxy before he frontally challenges the caste system, which he does, provoked by Ambedkar. Gandhi's path is all his own, and it's unappealing to both the radicals and the reactionaries."
A short review here. 
I still find him fascinating and try to understand him. One of his ideas seems to be some kind of local self sufficiency. I wonder whether the following is somewhat along those lines Via Campesina.

Why do I still try to do mathematics?

 It is off and on work after retirement in 2005, there is no money in it now and it is very hard work in the few strands that I still try to engage in. I have forgotten some of the elementary stuff and basic definition and to verify even simple things takes time and one has to be fairly sure of basic stuff before thinking about more advanced topics. In general topics, one is not so precise about basic concepts; perhaps there is a band width and fuzziness to many concepts which makes conversations possible. Then one can build on what seem more agreeable to one, confirm ones prejudices and continue to have some opinions about the world. But others have different opinions and often this results in acrimony and chaos. Perhaps mathematics balances this approach to some extent particularly when one is rusty. One has to be precise about basic concepts and it takes a lot of time to understand each sentence in an advanced paper. Hours and days go by and some feel for the topic develops and more precision later. In retirement, one is not in a hurry to finish things. I go on for days dreaming to see the ideas floating around and trying to reign them and then after months some understanding emerges. And in the end, one is a bit more certain about one's conclusions than in everyday life. It is some sort of meditation. Perhaps there are more human motives. One has earned some esteem from persons that one has respected for their work and may be one is still hankering for such esteem.

Rahul Banerjee on ‘Late Marx’

Rahul  Banerjee discusses ‘Late Marx and the Russian Road’ edited by Teodor Shanin here. Some parts of the book available at google books.Another review by Marc Edelman. There are also various discussions by Michael Hudson posted before. 

One on music

Music is not for ears
“Joshua Bell is a star violinist who plays at the world’s great concert halls. People regularly pay more than $100 per ticket to hear him perform. Everything about the setting of a typical concert implies how worthy the music is of a listener’s full attention: the grand spaces with far-away ceilings, the hush among the thousand attendees, the elevation of the stage itself. In 2007, a reporter from theWashington Post had an idea for a social experiment: what would happen if this world-renowned violinist performed incognito in the city’s subway? Surely the exquisiteness of his sound would lure morning commuters out of their morning routine and into a rhapsodic listening experience.

Instead, across the 35 minutes that he performed the music of Bach, only seven people stopped for any length of time. Passers-by left a total of $32 and, after the last note sounded, there was no applause – only the continued rustle of people hurrying to their trains. Commentators have interpreted this anecdote as emblematic of many things: the time pressures faced by urban commuters, the daily grind’s power to overshadow potentially meaningful moments, or the preciousness of childhood (several children stopped to listen, only to be pulled away by their parents). But just as significantly, it could suggest that the immense power of Bell’s violin-playing does not lie exclusively in the sounds that he’s producing. Without overt or covert signalling that prepared them to have a significant aesthetic experience, listeners did not activate the filters necessary to absorb the aspects of his sound that, in other circumstances, might lead to rhapsodic experiences. Even musicianship of the highest level is susceptible to these framing effects. The sound just isn’t enough.”

Possibilities

Sperm count zero Long read.

Long read from Oliver Bullough

in The Guardian The real Goldfinger: the London banker who broke the world A review of the book Moneyland in The Guardian. The theme is familiar from Shaxon’s Book on Tax Havens reviews by David Runciman in LRB Didn’tthey notice?. But there seems to be more spice in the book.

Along different lines using more recent studies by economists How US Multinationals Shifting Income to Foreign Countries Reduces Measured GDP 

George Orwell on freedom of the press

Apparently it was the proposed prefaceto ‘Animal Fam’ The freedom of the press

How big is the middle class?

“The world is on the brink of a historic milestone: By 2020, more than half of the world’s population will be “middle class,” according to Brookings Institution scholar Homi Kharas.

Kharas defines the middle class as people who have enough money to cover basics needs, such as food, clothing and shelter, and still have enough left over for a few luxuries, such as fancy food, a television, a motorbike, home improvements or higher education.”

according to a new report.

 This may explain why activists like Rahul Banerjee feel frustrated.

Rahul Banerjee gets some rare seeds

Pearl Diving in Bharia Land  “Subhadra remembered that many years ago when our friend Jacob Nellithanam had been running a campaign to preserve indigenous seeds, he had brought a variety of Bajra that had long whiskers on its seeds when on the plant that prevented the birds from eating it. She said that we should get that variety as only then would we be able to revive Bajra cultivation in Pandutalav. So began our search for the whiskered pearl!”

Carl Zimmer on the latest hybrid find

 A Blended Family: Her Mother Was Neanderthal, Her Father Something Else Entirely 

Longest train ride through India

From Dibrugarh in Assam to Kanniakumari Early this year, I took this train from Visakhapatnam to Ongole. It came seven and half hours late. But the waiting room was clean and nice, the ladies were constantly cleaning it and making decorations with ‘muggulu’ in front. There were a constant stream of transit passengers. I did not mind.

Have bees solved the travelling salesman problem?

Not really. Apiological: mathematical speculations about bees (Part 3: Travelling Salesman) 

Kohli’s new trick

Kohli’s magic trick is his suppression of ego says Mark Nicholas 

Pratap Bhanu Mehta is not amused

 The age of cretinism self recommending. It is subtitled ‘India’s reactionary modernism’.
‘.

Excerpt from new book on the tangled genetic tree

By David Quammen seems better than the review in NYTimes.

A religion for our times?

Spaghetti injunction: Pastafarianism is not a religion, Dutch court rules 

Review of a recent book by Noah Harari

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari review – a guru for our times? “The best reason not to throw this book out of the window is that, occasionally, Harari writes a paragraph that is genuinely mind-expanding.”

Women in Neuroendocrinology

How women came to dominate in Neuroendocrinology by Nicole Baran. Some chapters from this book seem available online. 

Death of a Marxist

on the Egyptian Marxist Samir Aminby Vijay Prashad

David Brin on the Neolithic bottleneck

In Bio-Scientific problems and quandaries David Brin writes among other things:
“But are we still evolving? Between 9000 and 7000 years ago, there appears to have been a plummet in genetic diversity among human males, in what’s called the ‘Neolithic bottleneck.’ An undergrad is now credited with coming up with an explanation. Heck the surficial hypothesis is obvious – that across that time, combative males prevented other males from breeding. But apparently this study's methodology for using available data to exclude other hypotheses was very clever.  “Zeng surmised that intense warfare between patrilineal clans killed off so many men, only one was left for every 17 women.”

This should come as no surprise. Historical accounts show numerous societies doing this, even in historical times. Polynesia, for example, and the Mayan states. All of the adult males in a valley or on an island might be wiped out and replaced by the invaders who were likely related. (Indeed, I wonder that the authors of this study haven't zeroed in on those more recent episodes.) Nearly all of us are descended from the harems of the fierce men who won these struggles... helping to explain the "quirks" or unpleasant proclivities we see in many modern males, traits that are unsuitable for civilized living. Indeed, if this cycle were allowed to continue, it might help to explain the “Fermi Paradox” of why we don’t see high, alien civilizations.”

From Vinod Mehra’s memoirs

Atal Bihari Vajpayee and his Achilles heel: Excerpts from Vinod Mehta’s memoirs 

Interview with Jean Dreze

‘Hindutva Is Better Described as a Movement of the Oppressive Minority’: Jean Dreze 

Review of THE TANGLED TREE A Radical New History of Life By David Quammen In NYTimes. And an excerptfrom the book. Despite what the review says, two women scientists are mentioned in the book “Meanwhile, the corn geneticist Barbara McClintock, discovering genes that bounce from one point to another on the chromosomes of her favorite plant, worked with very little support or recognition through the prime years of her career—and then accepted a Nobel Prize at age eighty-one.

Lynn Margul is, a Chicago-educated microbiologist unique in almost every way, shared at least one thing with McClintock: the frustrations BLUES1P_Quammen_TangledTree_KB.indd 13 6/21/18 4:06 PM xiv Three Surprises: An Introduction of being dismissed by some colleagues as an eccentric and obdurate woman. In Margulis’s case, it was for reviving an old idea that had long been considered wacky: endosymbiosis. What she meant by the term was, roughly, the cooperative integration of living creatures within living creatures. That is, not just tiny creatures within the bellies or noses of big creatures, but cells within cells. More specifically, Margulis argued that the cells constituting every creature in the more complex divisions of life—every human, every animal, every plant, every fungus—are chimerical things, assembled with captured bacteria inside nonbacterial receptacles. Those particular bacteria, over vast stretches of time, have become transmogrified into cellular organs. Imagine an oyster, transplanted into a cow, that becomes a functional bovine kidney. This seemed crazy when Margulis proposed it in 1967. But she was right about the matter, mostly.”

Links, 12, August 2018

  Why do many friendships dissolve as we age?
Laziness helped to lead extinction of Homo erectus
A British photographer captures the Indian phenomenon of men non-romantically holding hands
On belief superiority “Finally and more promisingly, the researchers found some evidence that belief superiority can be dented by feedback. If participants were told that people with beliefs like theirs tended to score poorly on topic knowledge, or if they were directly told that their score on the topic knowledge quiz was low, this not only reduced their belief superiority, it also caused them to seek out the kind of challenging information they had previously neglected in the headlines task (though the evidence for this behavioural effect was mixed).”
Spatial navigation countrywise  “While age most strongly correlated with navigational performance, researchers also found that country wealth, as measured by GDP (gross domestic product), correlated with performance. The researchers say this relationship may be due to associations with education standards, health and ability to travel. They focused on GDP for this analysis as it was a standard metric available for every country, but as part of the ongoing research project they will follow up with further comparisons of other factors.....Comparing the country-level results to the World Economic Forum's Gender Gap Index, the researchers found a correlation between country-wide gender inequality and a larger male advantage in spatial navigation ability. The gender gap in game performance was also smaller in countries with greater economic wealth.”

Michael Hudson on whether Marx was right or wrong

Fromthree years ago The Paradox of Financialized Industrialization
“All three kinds of crisis that Marx described are occurring. But the West is now in a chronic depression – what has been called Debt Deflation. Instead of banking being industrialized as Marx expected, industry is being financialized. Instead of democracy freeing economies from land rent, natural resource rent and monopoly rent, the rentiers have fought back and taken control of Western governments, legal systems and tax policy. The result is that we are seeing a lapse back to the pre-capitalist problems that Marx described in Volumes II and III of Capital and Theories of Surplus Value.
....

Bertell follows Marx in focusing on the production sector: hiring labor to produce products, but trying to get as much markup as possible – while underselling rivals. This is Marx’s great contribution to the analysis of capitalism and its mode of production – employing wage labor at a profit. I agree with this analysis.

However, my focus is on the causes of today’s crisis that are independent and autonomous from production: rentier claims for economic rent, for income without work – “empty” pricing without value. This focus on rent and interest is where I differ from that of Ollman, and also of course from that of Roemer. Any model of the crisis must tie together finance, real estate (and other rent-seeking) as well as industry and employment.

.....

In retrospect, Marx was too optimistic about the future of industrial capitalism. As noted above, he viewed its historical mission as being to free society from rent and usurious interest. Today’s financial system has generated an overgrowth of credit, while high rents are pricing American labor out of world markets. Wages are stagnating, while the One Percent have monopolized the growth in wealth and income since 1980 – and are not investing in new means of production. So we still have the Volume II and III problems, not just a Volume I problem.“

I wonder whether Michael Hudson is ignoring the reach of technology and our capacity for overproduction which made this inevitable.

An easy method for changing habits?

A Stanford University psychologist’s elegant three-step method for creating new habits via Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism. I think that I already stumbled upon this in a small way and have been using Fitbit to manage my walks. More at the following which I have not read. https://www.tinyhabits.com 

Autobiographical sketch from Michael Hudson

Michael Hudson: Life and Thought – An Autobiography it also provides a guide to some of his books, in particular the five volume series edited by him in collaboration with various others. I do not know Economics but generally what Michael Hudson said or says seems sensible to me. About a month ago, I borrowed from the library his five volume series of seminars and started browsing again. This will provide a guide to me while revisiting various books of his. A similar sketch from three years ago. Bibliography and his http://michael-hudson.com 

Lougi Zingales on Economics and feminism

https://promarket.org/every-good-economist-feminist/ :
“The Columbia Business School faculty proposed an interesting default rule to resolve these power imbalances. In case of disputes between a senior and a junior faculty, the intellectual property right of a joint project should be automatically allocated to the junior faculty, to protect the weaker contracting party. Such a rule should be adopted by all departments.”

Moving to cities

About U.S. But seems common in many other countries:
How to keep young people from fleeing small towns to big cities  "Communities also must change the way they train young people. One important thing Carr and Kefalas uncovered in their book about brain drain is that many communities have brought this problem on themselves. "Fueling the out-migration is a regional filtering system pushing some young people to stay and others to go," they write. "Teachers, parents, and other influential adults cherry-pick the young people destined to leave and ignore the ones most likely to stay or return. Civic leaders may lament the rural youth exodus and the accompanying brain drain, but they fail to see how their own actions have helped create the problem.""
Another about US excess Management Is Costing the U.S. $3 Trillion Per Year 

Gulzar Natarajan on Indian agriculture

India’s agriculture paradox- farmers subsidising consumers? “The conventional wisdom would have it that India's agriculture and its farmers are heavily subsidised and therefore inefficient. This is clearly not borne out by data. ”
Earlier Stabilising agriculture markets 

Top revenue collectors

Of the World’s top 100 economic revenue collectors, 29 are states, 71 are corporates And "There are 14 Chinese firms in the top 100, but 27 from the US".

Trump-Putin friendship

Trump-Putin friendship could be all about oil and China 

Some are optimistic about climate change

Economics How Changing My Economic Model Made Me a Climate Change Optimist:
"Two trends give reason for guarded optimism. The first is that governments have been doing many of the right things all along. Research support has gotten needed technologies invented, ever since NASA gave us photovoltaic cells. For many of these, directed support has overcome the barriers to commercialization. For a small few of these, policies in some places are moving us toward market saturation and fossil fuel prohibition. The EU has been pushing carbon neutral heating systems for buildings, and starting in 2021 this will be the standard for all new construction. ....
The second trend is an historical one. Virtually every technological transition people have studied has passed through a long preparatory phase, where new systems made barely a dent on the old, to an exponential growth phase that became self-reinforcing. I think renewable energy is turning this corner."

A Telugu song which travelled around

This is about the song.Manasaina cheli pilupu from jayamsimha 1955. M.L.Narasimham in his review of the film says "T.V. Raju’s music largely contributed to the movie’s success. He was assisted by the talented Sathyam. ‘Jaya Jaya Sri Rama Raghuvara’ (Ghantasala), ‘Madiloni Madhurabhavam,’ (Ghantasala & Rao Balasaraswati) and P. Susheela’s classical rendition ‘Nadireyi Gadichene cheliya…’ became popular. Some of the hit numbers drew inspiration from Hindi songs. The duet ‘Ee naati ee haayi…’ rendered by Ghantasala and P. Leela was taken from Ghulam Mohammed’s composition, ‘Jindagi dene vale sun…’ (‘Dil- E- Naadan’) and Rao Balasaraswati, A.P. Komala’s rendition, ‘Manasaina cheli pilupu…’ adapted from Shyamsundar’s composition, ‘chori chori aagse dilme…’ ( ‘Dholak’) are examples." AK in a post in Songs of Yore says in comment 113 
"I heard the songs again. Mansaina cheli pilupu uses the interlude music of Chori chori aag si dil mein lagakar chal diye. But the tune of the song is quite different which has been copied by Madan Mahan in Mera chhota sa dekho ye sansar hai and by Ramesh Naidu in Man soona tere bin haaye re, the links of the two Hindi songs have been given by KS Bhatiaji @101."
The links are This and This.
There are also Simhala versions like Mata aloke , this one by Jikki.

Village Reconstruction Organization

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_Reconstruction_Organization  

"The Belgian Jesuit Michael A. Windey had served at St. Xavier's College, Ranchi, as a professor and as founding director of the Xavier Institute of Social Service.^[4][5] A typhoon on the east coast of India in 1969 with floods that submerged Guntur drew him to Andhra Pradesh, ending his career as a professor as he undertook the task of reconstructing villages.^[6] 

...

The organization assists with the construction of villages as well as facilities within the villages: schools and skills training centers, health clinics,^[9] childcare and community centres,^[21] and homes for children and homes for the elderly,^[22] especially among the dalits.^[23] Jesuit novices help with programs such as Bala Mela, construction works in villages, laying of roads, and archeological survey.^[24]"

Inspiring persons

This Man Gave up an IRS Job to Sow The Seeds of Change in 7000 Villages, 30 Lakh Acres! 

Dan Wang on how technology grows

 Long read with interesting points: How Technology Grows (a restatement of definite optimism) via Tyler Cowen.
Excepts:
"The goal of both pieces is to broaden the terms in which we discuss “technology.” Technology should be understood in three distinct forms: as processes embedded into tools (like pots, pans, and stoves); explicit instructions (like recipes); and as process knowledge, or what we can also refer to as tacit knowledge, know-how, and technical experience. Process knowledge is the kind of knowledge that’s hard to write down as an instruction. You can give someone a well-equipped kitchen and an extraordinarily detailed recipe, but unless he already has some cooking experience, we shouldn’t expect him to prepare a great dish."

"What happens when we stop the flow of knowledge up the stack? I think that the weakness of the US industrial robotics sector is instructive. The US has little position in making high-end precision manufacturing equipment. When it comes to factory automation systems, machine tools, robot arms, and other types of production machinery, the most advanced suppliers are in Japan, Germany, and Switzerland. I think the reason that the US has little position can be tied directly to the departure of firms from so many segments of manufacturing. How do engineers work on the design of automation systems if they don’t have exposure to industrial processes?"

"My favorite genre of the Bloomberg column has become Noah Smith dunking on the United Kingdom. Services make up about 80% of the British economy, and that has brought along a host of problems. These include low levels of productivity growth over the last two decades, extraordinary vulnerability to the financial crisis, and low levels of R&D spending by its biggest companies. Matt Klein has put forward a fun claim: “Take out Greater London—the prosperity of which depends to an uncomfortable degree on a willingness to provide services to oligarchs from the Middle East and the former Soviet Union—and the UK is one of the poorest countries in Western Europe.”"

Recent Michael Hudson report

  The Michael Hudson Report: The “Next” Financial Crisis and Public Banking as the Response

Rural finance in India

Rural finance: Delays in cash transfers are pushing troubled beneficiaries into greater debt, poverty, the sixth and last part of a series.

Edward Luce interview with Kissinger

It is behind a firewall. Internet search may help. Henry Kissinger:"We are in a very, very grave period"  some of the excerpts are in Trump, Putin & Helsinki: Kissinger still calls the shots . One excerpt "I think Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretences.”

About Vitamin D deficiency

i do not understand this well. From what I can gather, higher doses are needed than those recommended by US. Generally many other countries follow US but Finland seemed to have bucked the trend.
US admits math mistake was made in 2010 in estimating Vitamin D, but will not change recommendations – Nov 2017
Improved health due to Vitamine D fortification in Finland
I saw the general idea in this article but did not understand it well. Towards the end, the previous article links to The big Vitamin D mistake whose introduction is clearer.

A new shape:scutoid

Scientists spot a new shape: Newly identified 3D form called the 'scutoid' lets cells pack together without wasting energy
The Nature article here. 

India's linguistic diversity

Podcast: Two scholars, a century apart, record India's rich linguistic diversity from Scroll.in July 2016
The Centre Cannot Hold How GN Devy challenges our concept of knowledge from Caravan magazine, July, 2018
I posted the Telugu recordings in 2011 but none of the links work except this Voices from Colonial India by Sohini Chattopathay from January, 2011,
The Telugu recordings are Here, posted by sumanspati reddy from Hyderabad. At that time Hyderabad state was omitted since it was not officially ruled by the British.

Latest from Antonio Damasio

A review of er of things : life, feeling, and the making of cultures in Brain Pickings by Maria Popova
P.S. Related A review of Strange Stories of Extraordinary Brains—and What We Can Learn From Them by Helen Tmoson

Two on Sajjad Hussain

one by Rudradeep Bhattacharjee in Scroll.in  https://scroll.in/reel/840699/sajjad-hussain-the-composer-whose-music-has-endured-with-a-tenacity-that-defies-reason and another by D.P.Ranagan in Songs of Yore 

https://youtu.be/dN4cTuf42EY 

Exercises for older people?

According to my wife https://www.medibank.com.au/livebetter/be-magazine/exercise/beginner-bedtime-yoga-routine/ 

A new book on cooperation

Interview with the authors:A New Way to Think About Solving the World’s Biggest Problems How to build global cooperation. It’s SIMPOL! Excepts The book at Amazon https://www.amazon.com/SIMPOL-Solution-Solving-Biggest-Problems/dp/1633883930 

John Lanchester on ten years after 2008

After the fall The early parts are familiar. Towards the end, he talks of the missing wealth:
"The frustrating thing is that the policy implications of this idea are pretty clear. In the developed world, we need policies that reduce the inequality at the top. It is sometimes said these are very difficult policies to devise. I’m not sure that’s true. What we’re really talking about is a degree of redistribution similar to that experienced in the decades after the Second World War, combined with policies that prevent the international rich person’s sport of hiding assets from taxation. This was one of the focuses of Thomas Piketty’s Capital, and with good reason. I mentioned earlier that assets and liabilities always balance – that’s the way they are designed, as accounting equalities. But when we come to global wealth, this isn’t true. Studies of the global balance sheet consistently show more liabilities than assets. The only way that would make sense is if the world were in debt to some external agency, such as Venusians or the Emperor Palpatine. Since it isn’t, a simple question arises: where’s all the fucking money? Piketty’s student Gabriel Zucman wrote a powerful book, The Hidden Wealth of Nations (2015), which supplies the answer: it’s hidden by rich people in tax havens. According to calculations that Zucman himself says are conservative, the missing money amounts to $8.7 trillion, a significant fraction of all planetary wealth. It is as if, when it comes to the question of paying their taxes, the rich have seceded from the rest of humanity."

Pay it forward

the Wikipedia article Pay it forward. I came across this in Second shot coffee. Possibly one unconsciously knew it and practiced it off and on.

Eric Weinstein on inequality

Excerpts and comments via Arnold King who says “I would describe the interview as a set of very interesting threads, which to my frustration are left dangling. I don’t know whether the fault lies with Eric, the interviewer, or the editor.” one of the comments says that there are some podcasts which are more satisfactory.

On Khemchand Prakash

 KHEMCHAND PRAKASH : DIL NE PHIR YAAD KIYA by Sushrut Vaidya, a comprehensive article on his life and work.

Hockey and the Anglo-Indian connection

How the Anglo-Indian community created two No 1 hockey teams
See also http://iprovok.com/anglo-indians-a-forgotten-chapter-of-indian-hockey/

Three books in one review

By John Lanchester : Can economists and humanists be ever friends? Very nice article like some other things he has written.