Quo Vadis, Pakistan

Pakistan matters critically to India. One could dismiss it as a failed tin-pot dictatorship and is of little consequence with respect to India’s development and economic growth. But it is just because it is a tin-pot dictatorship that it matters. Even more precisely, it has been made into a tin-pot dictatorship so that it can serve as a lever to indirectly control India. I deliberately say “made” because it is a tool used by the West and therefore fashioned by and kept in “good” shape to serve the purpose. Principally, it is the US which wields Pakistan most adroitly.

One cannot escape the fact that the US is the world’s reigning hegemon. Nothing much of any significance happens around the world is not in some way affected by what the US does. No large nation or a confederation of nations is immune from US influence to some extent, whether it be India, China, or the EU. But when it comes to small impoverished dependent nations, the US is the ultimate dispenser of their destinies. Pakistan is what the US wants it to be, and Pakistan does what the US wants it to do.

Cyclone Sidr — Update

Here’s an image of tropical cyclone Sidr from the NASA Earth Observatory.

Tropical Cyclone Sidr was continuing its northward progress over the Bay of Bengal on November 14, 2007. It was moving north toward the Mouths of the Ganges at a speed of 13 kilometers per hour (8 miles per hour), and winds in the storm system were raging at 220 km/hr (140 mph) near the storm’s center, making it a Category 4 strength tropical cyclone.

Cyclone Sidr

Tropical cyclone Sidr is expected to make landfall sometime early Friday morning near Kolkata. Let’s keep our fingers crossed and hope that it does not have the impact of cyclone Gorky which hit Bangladesh in 1991 killing 138,000 and leaving 10 million homeless.

Do the Taliban have Buddha Nature?

Here we go again. In March of 2001, the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan. These statues had stood there since the early 6th century. Symbols of universal compassion, these were in the eyes of Islam, something that had to be destroyed.

Full marks for perseverance, though. “When Mahmud of Ghazni conquered Afghanistan and part of west India in the 12th century, the Buddhas and frescoes were spared from destruction though Buddhist monasteries and other artifacts were looted or destroyed. Aurangzeb, the last Mughal emperor distinguished for his religious zeal, employed heavy artillery in an attempt to destroy the statues. Nadir Shah, too, had cannon fire directed at the statues. But over the centuries the statues had largely been left untouched.”

Necessary and Sufficient

Amit wrote in a comment:

Atanu, when you have time, I’d invite you to do some research on food production and malnutrition, and write a post on it – whether lack of food is because of insufficient production, or asymmetrical distribution and inefficient use of crops/food. Because it’s a very popular sentiment that’s paraded out every time a case is made for biotech crops – that it is the solution to world hunger. Would be interesting to read your take on it.

Sorry but it is unlikely that I will find the time to do the suggested research any time soon. But for now, here’s one common trap that we sometimes stumble into: the inability to distinguish between “necessary” and “sufficient” conditions.

Happy Diwali

Deepavali Greetings! May Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, be a welcome visitor to your home and workplace.

[The WordPress software is putting a “Japonophile” watermark on the pictures. I will have to figure out how to disable that one.]

Transgenic Cotton

Technology, in economics jargon, expands the production possibilities frontier (PPF). In simpler terms, you get more stuff by using technology by using resources more efficiently. Which in turn means that you have less waste produced as a by-product of the production of useful stuff.

A recent column by Gurcharan Das titled “Let Biotech Crops Bloom” notes how the introduction of transgenic cotton has doubled India’s cotton production in the last five years and is second largest cotton producing country (after China.) He laments the fact that Indian farmers don’t have access to transgenic rice, soya, corn, etc, because they have not been approved. He puts the blame on “misguided activists, timid bureaucrats, and apathetic politicians.”

Comment Policy

In the past, I used to try and respond to all comments. Time constraints do not allow me that luxury any more. I sincerely appreciate the comments, however, and my thanks for those thoughtful comments. Some comments which call for a clarification or further elaboration of the subject, I will respond in subsequent posts.

I generally don’t censor comments and I don’t remove comments, however irrelevant to the post, unless it is pure spam. Some comments test my resolve about not removing comments. Those are the type which clearly indicate that the commenter has not bothered to read my post carefully, or has read it with sufficient prejudice that my point has been utterly misunderstood. Those comments are pure bullshit and against pure bullshit, even the gods struggle in vain, leave alone a mere mortal.

Usual rules of courtesy apply. Consider reading someone’s blog akin to visiting them at home. You are a guest and generally welcome. If one wishes to abuse the host, one should have the decency to leave the place, and do the abusing from a different place.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Hell’s Angel

My distaste for poverty is only exceeded by my utter contempt for those who nurture that awful monster of poverty that chews up living human beings and spits them out like so much garbage. True evil to me is that impulse that disregards human suffering, and more often than not, that evil force emanates from ideology and dogma. Communism is one such evil; the other horror is organized religious dogma mostly represented by the monotheistic religions. The richer the organized religion, the more powerful it is, and has the will and the means to wreak havoc and cause misery. The Catholic Church is exhibit A. It has a shining history of centuries of wholesale murder and it has not deviated one bit from that unholy crusade to this day. Its most celebrated foot-soldier — nay, general — in its war against decency and humanity was Mother Teresa. Christopher Hitchens called her (among other things) the Ghoul of Calcutta. I call her Teresa, the Merciless.

Here’s Hitchens (from one of his live debates):

Model Based Thinking

A brief reminder is in order here because from time to time, I do resort to very simple economic models. The utility of simple models in assisting thinking about complex matters is under-appreciated by most of us whose professional interests do not require model-based thinking. In the hard sciences, physicists and cosmologists commonly use models to clarify their thinking and illuminate the essential features of the complex theoretical subjects they study. Where the search space of a solution is unmanageable large, simulations based on simple models come in handy, such as in meteorology.

Elegant models are amazing things. That is why economists do it with models. The study of the real world would be too confusing if it were not stripped of all inessential details. The hard part lies in figuring out which bits to retain and which to discard while creating the model. Model building is an art and the product is often a thing of spectacular beauty and elegance. They illuminate and enlighten; they capture the imagination and make accessible features of the real world that would otherwise be lost in a haze of misapprehension. It seems to me that learning simple models has to be part of a well-rounded education. Children should be exposed to simple models and then taken through the logical deductions that the assumptions imply. But I will not digress into models and our education system for now. What I want to do is quote a passage from Paul Krugman, an economist whom I especially admire for his clarity of thinking and exposition, about how serious economics is done.