The Maanga

A conversation with a cousin included the mandatory sentences, filled with sadness, about the recent flooding in the Delta districts and consequent washout of crops ready to be harvested in a week’s time. The reply was swift — ‘Don’t even bother. After all this works best — Karunanidhi government will either equal or do better than the Jayalalitha government. We will get money for crop loss like the last time. And we did not even have to spend on labor‘.

The said cousin is 20 years old.

Think of top ten non-Ghandhi politicians from the Indian National Congress. Among them, count those who can win an election by themselves — no, not a state, just their constituency.

If only such a thing as Hindi heartland did not exist.

It’s somehow very sad when an adult decides to seek validation of one’s own life. Especially, when it is as stunning as this.

India’s politicians have evolved with Television while TV anchors have stagnated.

A landslide for Modi will leave Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and, to a lesser extent, Karnataka, alone.

Read this special piece on NRIs returning to India. It should not have been written, and even if it has been, it should not have been read. I could have rather spent an evening re-reading Aimé Césaire´s  “Notebook of a Return to my Native Land” 

Brain Drain is an over-used concept. It appears to imply that the average IQ of the Indian immigrant to the USA is significantly greater than the average IQ of the person who stays behind. While this might definitely have been the case in the early 70s, I am not sure it is any longer the case. The software boom has definitely trickled down to the morons. In some strange version of the dutch disease, the ease of getting an H1B visa has made mental processes redundant in most Indians abroad. 

Indians define their culture by two great taboos. Food and Sex. What you put inside your body has to be Indian. These taboos, buried in the unconscious, flare up when you have kids. You have to ensure that your daughter toes the line with these taboos. Sons may have more leeway, if they are not gay.  

The only truthful reason I can give if I return to India, is that I have not succeeded to the extent I expected. That, my failure is better hidden in a country with a population of over a billion poor people than three hundred million rich people. That I have not made any friends in the US, other than a pretzel lady and some taxi drivers. That I long for the kind service of poorly paid Indian serfs, to brighten my evening years  All that, and the taboos.  

In economics, we appear to be in the same situation that Wittgenstein appeared to be when he wrote the Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus. He said that most problems were not philosophical problems at all, but problems of language. Since he also felt that most philosophical problems had been solved (notably by him) after the first world war, he felt free to go back to Austria and teach at a village school. It is another issue that he got kicked out for beating children at the school, and decided to write another book.  

Most economic truths, which were not self-evident before 1991, appear to be so self-evident now, that it seems pointless arguing about them. Is there any major economic problem left?  

There appears to be one, and that is the problem of Africa. Different economists have different suggestions. Jeffrey Sachs (and Bono) suggest massive aid. William Easterly, who worked at the World Bank and now teaches at NYU, saying massive aid has already been given and has not been effective. Easterly alone, of all economists, is modest enough to confess that he doesn’t know what is wrong with Africa and what could be done. All he says is that centrally planned, large-scale aid operations are bound to fail.  

Now, we have a new book and some more new research from Paul Collier of Oxford. Collier attracted some attention with a paper at  some Jackson Hole conference, which offered an interesting, geographical perspective on Africa, which I initially thought was as intelligent as Jared Diamond´s Collapse. So, I just ordered his new book, The Bottom Billion for Christmas reading.  

Reading Easterly´s review of this book, I feel I am bound to be disappointed. Collier did his research with the World Bank, and in the words of Daren Acemoglu, his work contains “correlations that are interpreted as causal effects that are really no more than correlations”. We are back with the ghost of Wittgenstein, who intoned “Der Glaube an den Kausalnexus ist der Aberglaube” (Superstition is the belief in the Causal nexus).

As someone fond of describing myself as classical liberal, I have always been surprised by my instinctive opposition to global warming, emissions trading and the like. Socialists welcome limits on emissions, as these imply limits on economic growth and bring back re-distribution on the agenda. For a liberal, economic growth and free trade should be able to achieve all the re-distribution that is needed, so any limits on either are instinctively opposed.  

In a perceptive article in the FT, Martin Wolf describes this conflict. (Might need registration).

Look. We missed an obvious opportunity.

All clever boys who can come up with widgets are hereby requested to work on ‘Bet on the NY Times most popular story‘ thing with immediate effect. Bastard boy, kindly.

“Intelligence sources confirmed that the LTTE supremo Velupillai Prabhakaran had sustained injuries in the air strikes carried out by four fighter aircraft of the Sri Lanka Air Force on a bunker complex in Jayanthinagar, Kilinochchi around 5.25 pm on November 26,” the defence ministry said.

One also wonders, if Avataram will be the next target.