Some Economics Links 30/4/07

A socioligist interviewsAmerican Economists:"ACADEMIC KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERT AUTHORITY IN AMERICAN ECONOMICS" by MIKE REAY.
ABSTRACT: "Connection to academic knowledge is a defining feature of modern expertise, and it is often treated as the key to maintaining professional authority. It is unclear however just where and when it has to be made, and how it might fail. Interviews with economists working in a variety of different settings in the United States suggest that most of their academic knowledge is too abstract to be of much substantive use, and their academic standards of scientific rigor may play only a minor role in legitimizing their day-to-day authority. This does not threaten their status however, because economists have become entrenched in a variety of organizational settings as possessors of a craft-like ‘core’ of valuable skills. The momentum of this basic institutionalization suggests that while connection to elite academic knowledge is a defining characteristic of modern expertise, it may not always be central to explaining ongoing expert authority."
A socioligist describes the Transnationalization of Economics:"The Construction of a Global Profession:The Transnationalization of Economics" by Marion Fourcade.
Abstract:
This article relies on an analysis of the institutionalization of economics worldwide during the 20th century to argue that the logic of professional development in this particular field has come to be increasingly defined in global terms. Connections to (mainly) U.S.-based standards of work and professional practice are routinely used in the local competition whereby different professional segments and groups seek to assert their authority on particular jurisdictions (scientific, corporate, or political). In this process of professional construction (or reconstruction), economies are being transformed through complex transnational mechanisms which, ultimately, feed back into the identity and jurisdictional claims of the economics
profession itself, both in the “core” and in the “periphery.”
Excerpt:
"The strength of Marx’s picture is that it brings to light the dual character of the capitalist developmental logic—the intensification of exploitation through both technological upheaval (the vertical or temporal dimension) and worldwide expansion (the horizontal or geographical dimension). Just like the capitalist production process, economic ideas and
technologies are never fixed—they work continuously at their own revolution. And just like capitalism, they strive for international diffusion. Professionals—private consultants, public technocrats, and scientific experts, many of whom are trained economists—constitute the main vehicles of these transformations."

Dani Rodrik stimulates candid conversations at the core according to Steve Waldman:
“Dani Rodrik's wonderful post on free trade and prices has started an extraordinarily candid conversation among economists. Economists sometimes rudely pretend that critics of free trade simply fail to understand "Ricardo's Difficult Idea", and that skepticism amounts either to ignorance, a kind of literary snobbishness, or simple corruption. In doing so, despite protestations to the contrary and rich nuances hidden in journals, economists as a group have grown doctrinaire in policy arguments regarding trade. All of a sudden, thanks to Dani Rodrik, they've begun to fess up.” And many links to the conversations in the post.
Dani Rodrik's attempted summary.
Fun with economics from Alex Leijonhufvud and
Alan Blinder( the second article needs subscription or Jestor access).

Judith Harris on "Why home does not matter"

Judith Harris whose research on the effects of home and parenting figured prominently in the works of Steven Pinker (How the Mind Works), Steven Levitt (Freakonomics) and Matt Ridley (Nature via Nurture) returns to the topic with a new book and an article in Prospect:
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=9275
It is very readable and there is a lot of research and common sense in what she says but I am not sure about her theory of basing her conclusions on the modular brain theory. This theory is not that widely accepted. See, for example, Herbert Gintis's comments in " Adopting Minds and Evolutionary Psychology" available from the papers section of http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~gintis/
UPDATE: Here is alink to author profile of Judith Harris and her research :http://home.att.net/~xchar/tna/bio.htm
Apparently she was dismissed from a doctoral programme and is an independent reseacher.

Latest from Jayaprakash Narayan

The April 10 post from the much admired Jayaprakash Narayan of Loksatta makes a strange reading:
http://jayaprakashnarayan.blogspot.com/
He first describes his conversion to market economics:
"It is now universally acknowledged that the ‘invisible hand’ of the market is a greater force of common good than the benevolence of the rulers. But even 30 years ago, this was not so obvious. I entered government service as a starry-eyed socialist with great faith in the power and intentions of the State. Then, in early 80’s, my stint as special officer of Visakhapatnam Steel Project, then India’s largest public sector project (Rs 8000 crore), looking after land acquisition, rehabilitation, labour relations and public order issues, cured me of my illusions. I learnt to my consternation that public sector in India is largely the private sector of those in public office, giving endless opportunities for pelf, privilege, patronage and petty tyranny. Mercifully, things have improved since then with progressive expansion of competition and choice. The communications and consumer goods revolution, and accelerated growth are two obvious gains of liberalization."
He then goes on to say that market cannot be the panacea to all problems and pins his fath on philanthropy:
"But that is not how the capitalist West behaves! The charities of Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are known to all. The great North American Universities of Harvard, Yale, Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, Vanderbilt, Stanford, McGill, Duke, Illinois Institute of Technology and Vassar College were all built through private charities. Smithsonian Museum, and several foundations – Ford, Kellogg, Rockefeller, Mellon, Carnegie and Kresge – are all promoting public causes with private funds. Those wealth creators understood the best value their money could get, and pursued public causes with vigour."
See http://alternativeperspective.blogspot.com/2007/04/behind-veil-csr-corporate-philanthropy.html for some of the problems with this approach. The approach of Loksatta of fighting corruption , raising public awareness, building social capital have been much admired and according to World Bank reports have reduced corruption in many cases. I am not sure whether faith in philanthropy is a substitute for the more difficult path which JP followed earlier.

Blogs that make you think

Peter Klein has a list of five blogs that make him think:
http://organizationsandmarkets.com/2007/04/26/five-blogs-that-make-me-think/
Robin Verghese of http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/followed up with his own list. Many blogs seem predictable after a while. I keep shifting. Some that I have been visiting regularly in the recent weeks (whether they make me think or not is not clear) are 3qurakedaily, Andrew Leonard's "How the world works" at salon.com (http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/index.html), Madhukar Shukla's AlternativePerspective, Rajshekhar's fracturedearth and Mark Thoma's Economists's view. No offence meant to others whom I visited in the past and am likely visit again.

Dani Rodrik wins the first Albert O. Hirschman prize

From http://www.ssrc.org/press/firstprize/ :
"I’m delighted with the choice of Dani Rodrik as the first recipient of the SSRC’s new Albert Hirschman Prize,” said Craig Calhoun, president of the SSRC. “Professor Rodrik’s work on development economics exemplifies the kind of social science values and engagements evident in Albert Hirschman’s work, as well as the kind of necessary knowledge the Social Science Research Council aims to bring to public affairs.”"
An excerpt from the Rodrik-Subramanian paper " From 'Hindu rate of groth' to productivity surge: The mystery of the Indian growth transition" (http://ksghome.harvard.edu/~drodrik/IndiapaperdraftMarch2.pdf):

"Our analysis focuses on the transition to high growth in the 1980s, and we have little to say about the 1991 reforms and the experience of the 1990s. We take the view that igniting growth and sustaining it are distinct challenges, requiring different sets of policies and approaches (Rodrik 2003, Hausmann et al. 2004). This paper is concerned exclusively with the challenge of igniting growth and the story of how India seems to have overcome it.
I. THE FACTS
A key fact that we establish at the outset of this paper is that the turnaround in this performance—the decisive break with the Hindu past—occurred around 1980 and not in the 1990s as most accounts have it. We are not the first to make this point: De Long (2003) and Williamson and Zagha (2002) have both emphasized that the approximate doubling of India’s growth rate took place a full decade before the 1991 reforms. Nonetheless, it is impossible to read the standard policy-oriented accounts and not leave with the impression that it is the reforms of the 1990s that have brought superlative economic performance to
India (Ahluwalia, 2002; Srinivasan and Tendulkar, 2003)."
T.N.Srinivasan's response to the above paper:
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/staffp/2004/00-00/sriniv.pdf

One version of Ahluwalia's views is here: http://casi.ssc.upenn.edu/research/papers/Ahluwalia_2002.pdf

Dani Rodrik has recently started a blog: http://rodrik.typepad.com/
UPDATE: Rodrik-Subramanian reply to Srinivasan's comments here http://www.imf.org/External/Pubs/FT/staffp/2005/02/rodrik2.htm (coutesy of http://neweconomist.blogs.com/new_economist/2005/09/hindu_growth_th.html). See also http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/09/rodrik_and_subr.html

A digger's story

From The Age on Anzac Day the story of a digger who gave his all and more:
"SOLDIER, prisoner of war and butcher, Ernest Brough has had more cause than most to think about life. For a start, at 87, he has lived a lot of it. Of one thing he is certain: it is worth more than mere money.

He lives humbly in a small, cluttered house in the Geelong suburb of Belmont, with the layers of his life piled around him.

When he sold his country block outside Geelong last year, he donated most of the proceeds — $300,000 — to St Vincent's Hospital for a new heart machine. "Money doesn't count much when you get old." he said. "I'm doing all right without the $300,000. I get a disability pension. I'm OK." "
Much more in the article. Onlt a few days ago, there was a story of businessman planning to spend around 7 million dollars for his 70th birthday bash.

Science and religion meet

in Bihar. From (via HUB) http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070418/hl_nm/india_polio_priests_dc_1:
"Hindu priests are blessing children with polio drops instead of traditional holy water, sweets or fruits to help eradicate the crippling disease in an eastern Indian state, an official said on Wednesday."

Lalita Mukherjea has a new blog

Lalita, a daughter of the Arudra couple and wife of a mathematician friend Kalyan has a new blog
http://roudrisms.blogspot.com
where she started posting her poems in Telugu and English.

Latest from orgtheory.net

The post http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2007/04/21/what-did-i-miss/ gives a sampling of previous posts which have links to some important and often readble articles. I found the articles from the post "what economists should learn from sociologists' and a few others that I have been able to read quite interesting. There are also some reading recommendations on economics books from http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2007/04/naked-economics.html. Enjoy.

Larry Sumners in Asia

Following Larry Sumners Speech in New Delhi"Ramgopal Agarwala, the senior adviser to R.I.S., or the Research and Information System for Developing Countries, quoted Mr. Summers extensively in a proposal that all Asian countries contribute to a fund that diverts money away from United States Treasury bills and into Asian infrastructure.

“If exposure to the United States deficit is not managed well, we cannot rule out a possible global recession, even depression,” said Mr. Agarwala, a former World Bank economist based in China, adding that Asia has a crucial role to play in correcting these imbalances.

The governments of China and India have both announced that they will invest their foreign exchange reserves in new areas, which will divert them from United States Treasury bills.

Subir Gokarn, the chief economist at Crisil, a ratings agency in India, said that Mr. Summers’s remarks about “the race to the bottom, and the adverse effects of globalization” strike a chord in Asia." See also Brad DELong' remarks in his weblog;
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/04/larry_summers_t.html and the comments there.

Some ideas of William Easterly

In view of the recent Easterly-Sachs debates, it may be useful to go back to Amartya Sen's review of Easterly's "The White Man's Burden" and Easterly's response.
From Sen's review:

“All of this is a great pity, since Easterly's book offers a line of analysis that could serve as the basis for a reasoned critique of the formulaic thinking and policy triumphalism of some of the literature on economic development. The wide-ranging and rich evidence -- both anecdotal and statistical -- that Easterly cites in his sharply presented arguments against grand designs of different kinds deserves serious consideration. In a less extreme form, they could have yielded an illuminating critical perspective on how and why things often do go wrong in the global efforts to help the world's poor.
………
The challenge is to respond to the plight of the hopelessly impoverished without neglecting to insist that help come in useful and productive forms.

In fact, Easterly makes exactly that point once the blast of rhetoric is turned down: "The good news about the noisy anti-globalization protesters, the hard-working NGOs, the rock bands and the movie stars, and the rich-country governments' increased interest in the Rest coming after 9/11 is that the constituency for the poor is growing. It's time for the rich-country public to insist that aid money actually reach the poor." Although not coming until after page 200, those sentences provide a better summary of the contribution of The White Man's Burden than do the rather extreme slogans to which Easterly chooses to give pride of place.
……
On the basis of his own investigations, Easterly is in an excellent position to systematize such insights. But this does not quite happen here, despite Easterly's occasional suggestions for how to make international aid more effective and less wasteful.
…..
Perhaps the weakest link in Easterly's reasoning is his almost complete neglect of the distinctions between different types of economic problems
……
There is much of merit in Easterly's perceptive vision about initiatives, incentives, and communication. We should be grateful to Easterly for the wealth of material he has presented, thereby enriching the development literature. We may have less reason to celebrate -- or even to accept -- the diagnosis of idiocy and obduracy he gives to those whom he calls "planners." But there is a strong case for judging a book by its best contributions, not its weakest points. My hope is that the "searchers" among the readers of The White Man's Burden will look for the convincing arguments Easterly does provide rather than for those he does not.”
From Easterly’ response to Sen:
“I have two responses: first, a "rhetorical drubbing" can promote accountability; second, the book does in fact offer positive alternatives to the conventional approach being drubbed.”
A drastic example of the sort that Easterly fears from Martin Walker’s review of “The White Man’s Burden”:
“From the air, one curious fact became clear. The vast swath of scrubland known as the Sahel, which translates as “the shore,” marks the transition from the true desert to the fertile lands of the south that are watered by the Volta and Niger rivers. It was dotted with recently built wells, and with their pumps and concrete rims these new wells were the epicenters not of the drought but of the death of the land around them. Great pans of dried mud and rutted dust stretched out in vast circles from each one. So after endless interviews with aid workers and local people and farmers, the real dimensions of this tragedy became clear. The drought was a man-made disaster, a tragedy of good intentions and of foreign aid.

The Sahel tragedy would fit perfectly into William Easterly’s new book, The White Man’s Burden, whose real message is in its long subtitle—“Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.”
…..
The grand project to make the Sahel more fertile, for example, began in the late 1950s when most of West Africa was under French rule, and the French built hundreds of wells to tap the underground aquifers. They also built rural health clinics, which meant that more babies survived and fewer adults died. A population explosion then followed, of humans because of the health system, and of livestock because of the wells and the need to feed the extra human mouths. Families that had two cows and a camel and a dozen goats very quickly became wealthy with new herds, a process that could be measured in the rise of the bride-price from one cow in the 1950s to a dozen by 1970.

But these extra animals, while plentifully supplied with water, also had to eat, and the Sahel was too fragile an ecology to feed them. So they ate everything, the scrubby thorn trees and the sparse grasses that stopped the thinnest of topsoil from being blown away in the Sahara winds. And the first places to be overgrazed into desert were the areas around the new wells. So while it was true that the Sahara was advancing by fifty kilometers a year and more, it was jumping from the dead zone of one new well to the next. The French aid program, while a short-term triumph, produced an ecological disaster, and the Sahel drought was nature’s way of killing off the population explosion and restoring the delicate balance between the Sahel’s limited supply and the voracious demands of the animals and humans.

The humanitarian airlifts and aid funds that were triggered by the heartrending reporting of this disaster could not do much for the livestock, but they helped save a lot of lives—at a further price. The food and medical aid centers were set up near the big cities where the roads were reasonable, and so towns like Agadez and Niamey, Ougadougou and Timbuktu, became surrounded by vast refugee camps for people who had nothing in the Sahel to return to. The Tuareg and the other Sahel nomads stayed, to become a burden to the fragile governments of poor and newly independent countries like Niger, Mali, and Upper Volta. Political tensions inevitably arose between Muslim nomads and the Christian blacks of the south, and scuffles over grazing rights for the few camels that were left to the nomad refugees turned into skirmishes and even gunfights. It was not what the French had bargained for.”
A more recnt article by Easterly on Africa here. Easterly and collaborators wonder whether thewealth of the nations was already determined by 1000BC.

Latest from fracturedearth

Rajshekar studies microfinance and women's empowerment in a somewhat cryptic study. The first part studies the transormation of MFIs (Micro Finance Institutions). Excepts:
"A brief backgrounder now before I discuss how the business changed for them: MFIs do not operate like traditional banks. That is, they are not classified as depository institutions that take client deposits and use them as lending capital. They focus on lending. The problem with this approach is that it isn’t easy to generate capital for lending purposes. Most of the capital they lend, especially in the early stages, comes in the form of contributions by governments, from philanthropic organizations and individuals, and as loans from governments and institutions that incur interest at below market rates. As an MFI matures, it can start borrowing from banks, and then on-lend it further at its own risk. This is clearly preferable from an operational basis as it demonstrates an ability to exist outside of the unreliable world of voluntary contributions.(26) Now, with the financial constraint lifted, the MFIs were free to expand as rapidly as they like.
It is pertinent to mention here that the rapid growth in MFI lending took place after 2003, with the introduction of ICICI Bank’s ‘partnership’ model. In this model, the MFI becomes an agent of the commercial bank.
.......This pressure to achieve institutional sustainability reflects in policy decisions to expand the scale of the programme, to increase the volume of loans disbursed per borrower, increase interest rates, tighten repayment discipline by enforcing punitive strategies and offer minimalist credit programmes. Minimalist, incidentally, refers to an approach which focuses only on providing financial services, as opposed to the more holistic “microfinance plus” approach which seeks to also provide livelihood support, or so-called “business development” services. Minimalist MFIs (the vast majority, says Ghate) recognise the importance of livelihood support services but take the view they are best provided by specialist NGOs and the public sector.(32)"
"To sum up. If they are to scale up, MFIs need funds from the commercial sector. But, this being commercial capital, the MFIs need to invest these funds in a sustainable, risk-averse. Which means that the MFIs will have to either abjure from lending to the very poor or accompany every loan with very strict conditionalities. In Andhra, so far, they have opted for the latter approach. And that, as we have seen, can hurt the women. An empowered woman would be in a position to resist changes that go against her interests. And yet, if the suicides, in India and Bangladesh, are anything to go by, the borrowers are not always in a position to resist the MFIs."
The second part, which I found more difficult, is about the empowerment of women. Excerpts:
"Much of the euphoria over microfinance as a silver bullet to solve the two problems of poverty and gender inequity rests upon two assumptions. One, pushing up the earnings of poor women by making available enough credit to engage in gainful occupations will help them gain greater bargaining power within their households; and, two, bringing together women in groups will not only strengthen their earning capacities, but also create an institutional space from where they can articulate their interests.(42) Mayoux calls this a virtuous spiral — women’s access to micro-credit leads to more well-being for families leading to greater bargaining power for women within the household, which then is seen to lead to greater empowerment in the public as a group.(43)
Whether this claim stands up to scrutiny has been the subject of much debate. According to Mayoux, for many women, (microfinance’s) impact on social and economic empowerment does appear to be marginal, and some women might be disempowered.(44) That is echoed by the findings of Goetz and Sen Gupta in Bangladesh. They found that on average women retained full or significant control over loan use in just 37% of the cases; nearly 22% of respondents were either unable to give details of loan use, or were aware of how their husbands or other male household members had used loans, but were not themselves involved in the productive process; about 43% of the cases, they found, fell into three categories of partial, very limited, or no control: indicating a fairly significant pattern of loss of direct control over credit.(45)
.......
Schemes like Kudumbashree, they aver, define ‘women’s empowerment’ as increasing their capacity to improve the well-being of their families. Empowerment here, they say, does not mean revolutionary change in power structures, but merely the creation of greater space and flexibility for the poor within the existing limits, postponing the more far-reaching changes to a distant future hopefully reached through the ‘virtuous spiral’.
This, they say, is not good enough. It cannot be. That puts the women in a very defenceless position vis:a:vis the development apparatus – be it the MFIs or the state government.
To challenge patriarchy, one needs to transform economic structures. And so, they write, a feminist interventionist micro-finance programme would define empowerment very differently. In such a context, it would be defined as the women acquiring the capability to transform the newly created opportunities and spaces so that the very limits of existing institutions, public and domestic, are challenged.(57)
The question is whether minimalist microfinance is good enough to deliver that."

An argument of Sir Arthur Cotton

From http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/bline/2002/10/14/stories/2002101400650900.htm:
"n 1878, Arthur Cotton had to appear before the Select Committee of the House of Commons on India Affairs consisting of 18 members (not one of them an engineer) to justify and vindicate his stand that irrigation expansion any day deserves a better investment than railways: "... the railways cannot carry either the quantities, or at the price, that is essential in India, ... or nothing can be more certain than that in the present case the future of India's millions depends greatly upon whether money is still expended upon Railways, to cost £9,000 a mile and carry 30,000 tons at one penny, or upon canals to cost from £2,000 to £8,000 and carry two or three million tons at one twentieth of a penny, and whether districts are to be put into the state of Tanjore, Kistna and Godavari, or left in the state of the rest of the Carnatic last year and of Orissa, Bihar and Central India a few years ago... " "
See the rest of the article for a plan of Sonti Ramamurthi which has not been followed up.

Some cleaning hints from Ecofriend

aboutremoving stains,
cleaning toilets and
natural air purifiers.

The boy who played chess with Kurt Vonnegut

Andrew Leonard writes about Vonnegut:
http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2007/04/12/vonnegut/index.html
Several more links about Vonnegut at 3quarksdaily. Andrew Leonard writes frequently about India in his blog (he is the same chap who praised Madhular Shukla and wrote about Glenn Davis Stone's work on Indian agriculture). Enjoy.

When everybody wore No.42 uniform

From Age Sports.:
" All over the major leagues, on the 60th anniversary of his first major league game, dozens of players, including the Los Angeles Dodgers team that won 9-3 against the San Diego Padres, wore uniforms with his No. 42 on the back in honour of Jackie Robinson Day.

..............

Wherever the Dodgers played, especially in St Louis and Cincinnati, black people from all over the South travelled to cheer him. But not everybody accepted him. Early in the 1951 season, the Dodgers arrived in Cincinnati after a life-threatening letter was delivered to the Reds' offices.

"Our manager, Charlie Dressen, got up and read the letter to us about how if Jackie took the field, he'll be shot," Carl Erskine, a revered Dodger right-hander of that era, recalled.

"There was complete silence. But then Gene Hermanski (the Dodgers left-fielder at the time) "piped up: 'Hey, Skip, I've got an idea. If we all wore 42 out there, they won't know who to shoot.' " Everybody laughed, especially Robinson.

When the Dodgers went out to warm up, Robinson was standing near Reese who joked: "You mind moving over a little, Jack, this guy might be a bad shot."

Robinson's trailblazing in baseball pre-dated the civil rights movement, which he later championed.

But until Sunday, Hermanski's joke was the only time it had been suggested that No. 42 should be worn by all the Dodgers, much less by dozens of other major leaguers. It should happen more often than once every 60 years."

Two interesting posts about China

one at Angry Bear and another at Brad Sester's blog.. Check also the comments, paericularly those by Dave Chiang in the second. One of Dave Ciang's comments:
"At this economic juncture, Chinese economic strategy in regards to its cache of US Dollar foreign reserves, is to minimize the damage to its economy when the dollar-centered global financial regime unravels. China is certainly recycling some of what it earns from trade surpluses to buy natural resources, companies, technology and oil wells abroad. But more investment flows are coming into China than are leaving it; this is what finances the factories that dot the Chinese landscape and the skyscrapers sprouting everywhere in its cities. Meanwhile, China’s current-account surplus translates into a vast build-up of dollar holdings. Whatever else China’s leaders may think about the United States, they can have no illusions that the dollars they have accumulated can ever be redeemed for anything close to their current purchasing power values. The Chinese also hope that when the dollar-centered global financial regime unravels, they will have an economy sufficiently developed to withstand the economic shock. With booming inter-regional Asian trade, unless the US Economy plunges into a depression, the continental Chinese economy is rapidly rising to the critical mass for self-sustaining domestic growth. That will allow it to deal with the collapse in American purchasing power when the US is finally forced to live within its means. The political fallout is another question entirely. The collapse of the dollar will take with it the US global hegemony project; the United States will be hard-pressed to sustain its global military reach in a world where it must earn euros or yen to pay its foreign creditors rather than print more Federal Reserve paper."

Euler's 300th birthday

celebration is drawing several articles particularly about his beautiful equation:
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20070414/mathtrek.asp
He was one of those who could work on any area of mathematics on any day and in the days when proofs were not always sound could feel his way through most complicated concepts and computations. Some say that he and Jacobi were the only two comparable to Srinivasa Ramanujam for their feel for astonishing formulae and he was probably the first to realize the many valuedness of the logarithmic function. He was also a religious man and there is this 'story' of his proof for the existence of god. If you sum the series 1-1+1-1+1-1+1... by one grouping (1-1)+(1-1)+...you get 0 and if you sum it 1+(-1+1)+(-1+1)+..., you get 1. Apparently this was how god created something out of nothing. The precise notion of infinite sums, called convergence, became clearer only with Cauchy but Euler got away with playing around with non-convergent series.

Rain forests sold for bags of sugar?

See http://www.guardian.co.uk/congo/story/0,,2054203,00.html

Some articles on consciousness

For some reason, questtion about god, consciouness and happiness do not seem to bother me (though having been poor off and on, poverty does); may be they will when I am older. I seem to read article son these topics only if they are short and readable and then forget them. Here are three such:
“The Society of selves” by Nicholas Humphry:
http://www.humphrey.org.uk/papers/2007SocietyOfSelves.pdf
from http://www.humphrey.org.uk/papers_available_online.htm
Paul Bork’s review of Nicholas Humphry’s “Seeing Red:A Study of Consciousness”
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=8612
V.S. Ramachandran's latest in Edge:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran07/ramachandran07_index.html