Simple narratives

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

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

Michael Hudson on Trump's infrastructure plan

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

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

Michael Hudson on debt cancellation in ancient days

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

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

why falling housing prices could be a good thing

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

Rahul Banerjee describes some of his experiences

The exasperated anarchist

Interview with Bernard Yeung

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

Economic impact of violence

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

Inequality and violence

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

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

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

More on Palma index

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

Recent trends on the tension between the government and civil society

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

The Middle Income Trap and Governance Issues by Tim Taylor

Ernest Gellner on civil society

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

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

Two for the road.

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

A 2014 appraisal of Obama

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

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

I am still remembered in mathematics

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

Bob Dylan opens up

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

Jerry Garcia interview from RollingStone 1991

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

Completing the first stage in a mathematics program

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

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

https://youtu.be/fHZiQmalmMU

Some changes

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

A dent to the founder's dream

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

Still doing mathematics

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