Narendra Modi's 100 smart cities

From Scroll.in "Every thing you wanted to know about Narendra Modi's 100 smart cities": "On Wednesday, the Union Cabinet finally took the bull by the horns. It cleared an approval for Rs 48,000 crore to be allocated to the Smart Cities Mission, with Rs 100 crore to be given to each city per year for the next five years." More in the article but it is not clear what smart cities are going to be like. Modi's inspiration seems to be China fro earlier reports. Here, in an interview, Paul Romer discusses about Charter cities, China's efforts and in passing about Modi and India. Some excerpts:
"Q: The idea of Charter Cities originated from Hong Kong and Shenzhen, am I right?

Romer: The two most interesting precedents for Charter Cities are Hong Kong and Shenzhen, so it does have some origins here. They each played important roles in fostering reform of the Chinese economy. But it is an approach that can be used in any country that wants to implement reforms, even a developed country like the United States. It turns out that this is a unique time in human history when it is possible to start many new cities because there is an enormous, unmet demand for city life.

Q: What are the essential elements of a Charter City?

Romer: In one sense, the essence of the idea is the notion of a Startup City. You have a chance to start a city anew.

Then the question is: “What can you accomplish with that? What are the things that will be required to make it successful?” I think what is unusual about a Startup City, as opposed to an existing city, is that you can propose something new without having to go through a long process of consultation and agreement amongst the people that might be affected by a change, one that would inevitably mean that a change that some people do not want is imposed on them. With a Startup City, you can propose something entirely new and let people choose whether they want to live under its rules, as embodied in its charter, the document that specifies its founding principles. People who want to try the reform can go there, and people who don’t, they don’t have to. With a startup, you can have reform without coercion.

This is part of the insight that Deng Xiaoping had in pursuing Shenzhen. As he explained later, he wanted a way to open the Chinese economy that avoided long argument and contention about what types of change to pursue and how to pursue them.

The idea is also closely related to the idea of a special zone, but it is a specific type of special zone.

....... 

Q: But don’t you think Shenzhen is a bit more like a Concession Zone?

Romer: I think there was some risk that it would be used as Concession Zone and who knows what kinds of compromises it took to make sure that it took off. But it seems clear to me that the fundamental motivation in establishing the four initial special zones, of which Shenzhen was the most successful, was to achieve local reform quickly in hopes that this would induce reform throughout China. To an overwhelming degree, the measures implemented in Shenzhen pass my two tests for reform: they have been adopted as permanent policies and they have spread to the rest of China."

Bits about India:

 "Q: In recent years, development economists focused on three research areas, namely the effects of international aid as favored by Jeffrey Sachs, the political economy effects on growth as promoted by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, or the experimental economics on growth championed by Esther Dulfo. How do you view the three theories of catch-up growth that are now the hottest in research?

Romer: You know, I actually don’t agree with any of these three. I think urbanization is the thing we’ve got to study. Consider the case of India. If it wants to get better access to the technology that already exists around the world, and make this technology available not just to an elite, but to all workers, even workers who are getting their first formal sector job that pays them a wage, they will have to have gateway cities that invite foreign workers and firms to come operate in India. And gateway cities that invite people from rural areas throughout India to come join them. Unfortunately, India is not building gateway cities that work. If you look at any of the Indian cities right now, they are as polluted as Chinese cities right now. The traffic congestion is horrible. They exclude new residents from rural areas.

In this context, think about what Jeff Sachs has proposed about providing more aid. There is nowhere near enough aid available to bribe Indians into building cities that work if they don’t want them. Change the political economy of India? Great if you can. But how? Where is the evidence that you can change things in a way that raises standards of living? As my friend Edwin Lim has observed, democracy in India has totally failed to provide such elementary basics as child nutrition or education for girls, failed even compared to neighbors like Bangladesh. And experimental economics? Cameras for teachers? Or as Lant Pritchett has put it in a recent blog post, do we really want to devote so much academic effort to experimental analysis of policies like women’s self help groups? [http://www.cgdev.org/blog/your-impact-evaluation-asking-questions-matter-four-part-smell-test] Where is the evidence that you can generate Chinese rates of growth from measures like these?

I think the new prime minister in India understands how important urbanization is to the future of his country. It is the make-or-break issue for India right now. But I think it’s going to be hard for him to do anything about this. They have a proposal for 100 Smart Cities that tries to address the problems they face, but it remains to be seen whether this will make any difference. I wish they were thinking seriously about letting some new jurisdictions enter as startups and compete for residents with all the failing ones that they already have."

Jewellery

Jhansi did not show much interest in gold ornaments in first thirty years of marriage. We did not have money to spare; only thing I remember buying is a pair of earrings for fifty dollars. When children started leaving home, she had money to spare from her earnings and started buying gold jewellery. By that time she was already using costume jewellery and did not find much difference in appearance except some costume jewellery caused allergies. She started giving the ornaments to grandchildren to play. Now some of them seem to be lost and it does not seem to make much difference except for a slight twinge about gold gone missing.

Telugu Cinema 1932-2000

I received 'Encyclopedia of Telugu Cinema (1932-2000)' by Dr. Vutukuri Venkata Satyanarayana. It was completed by him recently and not yet published. He kindly said that I can forward it to my friends. If anybody is interested, please let me know at anandaswarupg@gmail.com
P.S. One of the comments on my wall from Balu Bold gives this reference to Indian Cinema  https://indiancine.ma/
and  'Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema'. Ashish Rajadhyaksha & Paul Willemen 

Songs from Mr and Mrs 55, some with subtitles

in Upperstall. Check there Facebook page for many more links.

Some academics who are ex-bankers

thatb Itry to follow are Michael Hudson, Bill Black and Doug Henwood. Another I found recently is Michael Pettis. Apparently, he is also into music. Here is a portrait of him. Towards the end, there is a discussion of his ideas about China's position:
"Pettis' vision spans the globe, encompassing economic booms in postwar Japan , 19th century Argentina and the US. He positions modern China within a context broad enough that you start to see it isn't all as impossibly unprecedented as we might think.

He's certainly not afraid of being an outlier among commentators, having been one of the first to pick the scale of the slowdown China is now experiencing.

He has written that China's GDP growth rate will need to fall to between 3 and 4 per cent in the next few years if it is to successfully achieve the transition to a developed balanced economy.

As Bloomberg News noted recently, Pettis' research shows that "every investment-led growth miracle in the last 100 years has broken down". And it is very hard to escape the kind of enormous credit boom that China has just been through without a banking crisis.

The challenge for Beijing is to move fast enough with reforms to rebalance the economy before it hits what Pettis calls "debt capacity restraints".

But these days Pettis is not picking a GFC-style crash. He wrote in December that while a "banking crisis in China is always possible ... as long as Beijing implicitly or explicitly guarantees deposits, and as long as Beijing's credibility with Chinese households is solid, and I believe it is, I think we are more likely to see many years of Japanese-style 'zombie banks' than a banking crisis"."

Michael Pettis blog China Financial Markets. I do not think that I agree with his latest post.

Check also Michael Hudson's views from two years ago China: Avoid the west's debt overhead: A land tax is needed to hold down housing prices:

"China thus is facing a universal problem of how to steer its economic surplus into new capital investment (including public infrastructure) and rising living standards to create a thriving domestic market. Its challenge will be to avoid repeating this fatal path that the United States and Europe have taken since the 1980s. The aim is to prevent the economic surplus from being absorbed by rising land rents, prices for monopoly goods and services (roads, commercial privileges, communications and the like), and banking charges for interest and fees.

Over the next twenty years China will have to cope with the same problems of urbanization, rising housing and land prices that Western economies experience. The most important way to view these universal problems is to ask who is to receive the economic surplus: the government as taxes, individual property owners as rent, or banks as interest? This is the basic trade-off. Whatever “free” rent-of-location the tax collector relinquishes is available (“free”) to be pledged to banks as interest."

There is more historical description of land rents in the west and then:

"But if land is not taxed – or if the real estate tax rate is lowered – this will leave the homebuyer loaded down with debt. The lower the land tax, the higher the mortgage debt, as rental income is turned into a flow of interest by new buyers as land prices rise – on credit.

This is the path that the United States and other Western countries have taken, while the post-Soviet states since 1991 have been the most extreme in taking neoliberal advice to favor real estate and finance over labor and industry. Their self-destructive real estate bubble has loaded down their labor force with high debt service and housing costs, whilst their giveaway of public infrastructure to insiders (with no price regulation) has led to high basic living costs. Their disastrous collapse, capital flight, emigration of skilled labor, shrinking GDP and corruption should serve as an object lesson for what China should avoid."

Apparently, there is a series of books edited by Michael Douglas and collaborators: "We founded this project over 20 years ago at the Peabody Museum, which is their archaeology and anthropology department. We wanted to do a series of books on how modern economies and practices began. Our first colloquium was in 1994 on Privatization in the Ancient Near East and Classical Antiquity; our second volume was on Urbanization and Landownership in the Ancient Near East, about how cities were created and how landownership and real estate patterns developed into a market for real estate. The third volume was on Economic Renewal in the Ancient Near East, about how debt cancellations restored the land to its citizen-cultivators to provide a means of self-support for the free citizenry.

These colloquia grew so popular that we added a fourth volume, Creating Economic Order: Record-Keeping, Standardization and the Development of Accounting in the Ancient Near East, on the origins of money and account keeping from Mesopotamia to Mycenaean Greece and Egypt. And then ten years ago we had our fifth colloquium on Labor in the Ancient World. There have been so many revolutions in archaeology and Assyriology and even Egyptology in the last ten years that we’re only publishing this volume now, to be completely up-to-date."

A preview of the fifth book in the series Labor in the ancient world.

Neoconservative counterrevolution in USA

The Neoconservative counter revolution by Andrew Hartman
"As George H. Nash convincingly argues, the conservative turn taken by the Jews at Commentary demonstrated that Jews were more of the mainstream than ever before.
“In 1945, Commentary had been born into a marginal, impoverished, immigrant-based subculture and an intellectual milieu that touted ‘alienation’ and ‘critical nonconformity’ as the true marks of the intellectual vis-à-vis his own culture,” Nash writes. “Two generations later, Commentary stood in the mainstream of American culture, and even of American conservatism, as a celebrant of the fundamental goodness of the American regime, and Norman Podhoretz, an immigrant milkman’s son, was its advocate.”
In celebrating the “fundamental goodness” of America and its institutions, neoconservatives believed they were providing an important service to the regime they loved: they were protecting it from the New Left that they thought was out to destroy it."

Some links to progress in India

Diversity deficit across apex bodies of Indian parties by Rukmini S:
"Among Hindus, who dominate all six parties, the BSP’s CEC has the most SC representatives, while both the CPM’s Polit Bureau and the Nationalist Congress Party’s National Working Committee have none.

The NCP is in fact the most upper caste party, followed by CPI(M), in this metric."

The parochial Indian by Nissim Mannathukkaren: "India set out to establish a sovereign, socialist, secular and democratic republic. Socialism and secularism have fallen off on the wayside; now it hobbles with sovereignty and a wounded democracy. Ambedkar had warned a long time ago: “There is no nation of Indians in the real sense of the world, it is yet to be created.”"

Drinking milk from non-Indian cows 'could make children turn to crime'
More on Indian breeds from an expert Sagari Ramdas The loss of our breeds

Does it pay to farm in India?

By Rukmini S in The Hindu:
"As you can see, a farm household needs to have at least 1 hectare[approximately two and half acres, one acre is approximately 4040 square metres] of land to make ends meet every month. But given that over 65 per cent of households have less than one hectare of land, this means that two out of three farm households are simply not able to make ends meet.

Unsurprisingly, what this translates into is debt. Over half of all agricultural households are indebted, and these are not small debts; the average loan amount outstanding for a farm household in India today is Rs. 47,000. For marginal farmers, making under Rs 4,000 per month, which doesn’t even cover their consumption, loans of over Rs 30,000 must be extremely heavy burdens.

The southern states stand out for their level of indebtedness."
P.S. Devinder Sharma:in his blog http://devinder-sharma.blogspot.in/2015/04/how-farmers-have-been-deliberately-kept.html

Rojava

"Rojava—the Kurdish word for “west”—consists of three leftist enclaves making up an area slightly smaller than the state of Connecticut, in territory dominated by ISIS. In mid-2012, Assad’s forces largely withdrew from the area, and the battle was left to the Kurdish militias: the YPG (People’s Protection Units) and the YPJ (Women’s Defense Forces), the autonomous women’s militias. These militias are not the same as the Iraqi peshmerga, though the U.S. press uses that name for both.......leftists worldwide should be watching the remarkable efforts being made by Syrian Kurds and their allies to build a liberated area where they can develop their ideas about socialism, democracy, women, and ecology in practice." from The Revolution in Rojava by Meredith Tax

Nepal earthquake picures from Daily Mail

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3055045/Homes-offices-collapse-massive-earthquake-rocks-Nepal-destroying-historic-19th-century-tower.html

Religion and innovation

Do strong religious beliefs stifle innovation? from WSJ
"“In both international and cross-state U.S. data, there is a significant and robust negative relationship between religiosity and patents per capita,.....” 

Jhansi goes off to a temple, I stay back.

 I heard that a couple whose daughter is marrying soon organized a puja. I do not know whether it is related the marriage. The parents worked hard their whole lives and want to have big wedding for their only daughter. But the girl is refusing to have big wedding and wants to donate the money to some charity. And the boy's uncles have been working for dalits in Gujarat most of their lives. One hears some good news once in a while.

Another disclaimer

It worries me when my blog starts getting too many (by my standards) hits. I am worried that I may be misleading people since I myself am confused. Recently it is crossin 500 a day sometimes and some of the posts may be construed anti-American. At a personal level some of my best friends are American and I seem to feel at home when I wander around the streets in USA. But the country's policies may be different from what people want or aware of. There was time when US tried to help other countries, but slowly it shifted from a surplus economy to a deficit one in the early seventies. Some things might have happened without actually planning and the country just took 'advantage' of what came along. And now, it may be clawing to keep some of those advantages. In any case, I am confused and exploring these issues. And when somebody says that his son has one of the best paid jobs in a bank or a big US company (like Satya Nadella), it does not make me happy. 

Juan Cole China's new pivot

Pakistan as China's Hong kong West: China's New Silk Road & US Failure:
"Chinese President Xi Jinping made a state visit, full of pomp and circumstance, to Pakistan on Monday, but its centerpiece was a $46 billion investment in the country, dwarfing the US Congress’s $7.5 bn. program initiated in 2008. Whereas the US likes to sell useless weapons systems that either rust in warehouses or foment wars like that in Yemen, China’s investment is divided between $11 bn. in infrastructure and $35 bn. in energy.....

But the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is less about India and more about regional development for China and stabilization for Pakistan......

Since last June, Pakistan’s army has somewhat inexplicably turned on its former allies among the Pakistani Taliban with a big aerial bombing campaign (“Zarb-e Azb”) aimed at disrupting the Haqqani and other terrorist networks that had been targeting US troops and the Afghanistan National Army across the border. Haqqani leaders are said to have scattered. China appears to have made a defeat of the Pakistani Taliban insurgency a prerequisite for the CPEC, perhaps because of their links to Uygur fundamentalists. And, obviously, Pakistan can’t be Hong Kong West if it is routinely blown up by Taliban."

A Shamshad Begum song from Namoona 1949.Dancer?

httWps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtRsjQWgoIk&feature=youtu.be

The way of all flesh?

Vietnam forty years on: how a communist victory gave way to capitalist corruption by Nick Davies in The Guardian:
After the military victory, Vietnam’s socialist model began to collapse. Cut off by US-led trade embargos and denied reconstruction aid, it plunged into poverty. Now its economy is booming – but so is inequality and corruption
ed trade embargos and denied reconstruction aid, it plunged into poverty. Now its economy is booming – but so is inequality and corruption"

Some links on BIS-2

I like conspiracy theories. I would not go as far as Putin is a pawn of bankers (via Transmissions) but they indicate the possibilities. In any case, various groups, institutions and states seem be to working in a way that is not to the benefit of the common man. Here are some links for my own reference about Basel Committee and Basel Accords.
Wikipedia says BIS and Basel Committee are different though based in the same building. It seems BIS has a supervisory role http://www.bis.org/bcbs/membership.htm
Basel 1,2,3: http://www.bis.org/bcbs/history.htm
Role Japan financial crash around 1990 from Basel 1 (1988): http://www.mailstar.net/basle.html (eiht percent capital requirements)

Per Kurowski, a former executive director of the World Bank, has written extensively about the Basel Accords 2 and 3 (2004, 2009).
In the simplified language of Dumb Ideas:
"By allowing banks to hold only 1.6 percent in capital when investing in triple-A rated securities (e.g. tranches of subprime mortgages) or lending to sovereigns (i.e. like Greece, Italy and Spain), the regulations implied an authorized leverage of 62.5 to 1.

At the same time, regulations require the banks to hold 8 percent in capital when lending to job creating small businesses and entrepreneurs, i.e. an authorized leverage of 12.5 to 1.

.....

What we see then are the large organizations being very well funded and sitting on more than a trillion dollars in unused working capital, while small businesses and entrepreneurs find it difficult and expensive to get financing.

Banks don’t exist to avoid risk, he argues. They exist to take intelligent risks on behalf of society. The current regulations push banks in the wrong direction. Should we really be surprised that we have major economic problems and a lack of jobs?"

See also his Casino model here "The result will be too much betting on what’s perceived as safe, and too little betting on what perceived as risky; something that of course makes the financial sector and the economy unsustainable.

Unfortunately, the IMF, the Basel Committee, the Financial Stability Board; and experts like Lawrence Summers, Ben Bernanke, Paul Krugman, and Martin Wolf, none of them wants to acknowledge the risk-adverse distortions in the allocation of bank credit to the real economy, that the current bank regulations produce."

May be more, after I absorb these a bit.

Some links on BIS-1

Ruling the world of money by Edward Jay Epstein of diamond trade exposes in 1983:  “most exclusive, secretive, and powerful supranational club in the world.”

Developments up to 2015 from Chris Powell:
"In the part of his book excerpted tonight by Zero Hedge, LeBor notes that the enormous power, secrecy, and unaccountability of the BIS are inconsistent with the democracy purportedly maintained by some of the bank’s major members.

But reviewing LeBor’s book two years ago for The New York Times —

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/books/review/tower-of-basel-by-adam-le…

Michael Hirsh was probably right that the BIS “has been more of a witness to history than a maker of it, more Forrest Gump than Superman.” For, as Hirsch observed, “International finance is now largely dictated by global banking corporations, the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, and the other major central banks that make up the membership of the BIS. More often than not, they base their policy on national or regional interest.”"

Another from 2013, a bit more strident and comrehensive The Bank for International Settlements Who Rule the World by Frank De Varona:
"According to Adam Lebor, Gianni Toniolo with Piet Clement, and James C. Baker, authors of books regarding the history of the Bank for International Settlements, this supranational banking institution was created with unprecedented powers and privileges. The central bankers who created the BIS held politicians with contempt, the exception being if the politician was one of their own. The BIS founders wanted to build  a transnational financial system that could move large amounts of capital free from political or governmental control. The central bankers demanded and received   incredible immunity from their own governments, free from any type of regulation, scrutiny, or accountability for the BIS directors and members as well as their employees.....
Dr. Quigley described the international banking network in the following manner: “The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations. The key to their success, was that the international bankers would control and manipulate the money system of a nation while letting it appear to be controlled by the government.”"

From four years ago

"If the Qaddafi government goes down, it will be interesting to watch whether the new central bank joins the BIS, whether the nationalized oil industry gets sold off to investors and whether education and health care continue to be free." from
Libya: All About Oil or All About Banking?. 11 April, 2011
A little more at Central Banking and "Rogue" Nations from June 2012

Mixing up in the garden

and small farms. Plant with this and that" The science and folklore of companion planting:
"In Iroquois legend, three sisters — namely corn, beans and squash — are inseparable, growing and thriving together. But more than a legend, this hints at something important for growing: Science shows that planting certain crops together can yield more bountiful results and potentially keep pests at bay.

Known as “companion planting,” it’s something farmers, horticulturists and perhaps even your grandmother all do with varying degrees of success. According to Kate Garland, a horticulturalist at the University of Maine Cooperative Extension, some plants just do better when planted next to each other.....

And if all else fails, next spring, try again."

I have arrived at this sort of thing; particularly the last bit.