Classic

Please Make Up Your Mind

Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee of West Bengal has declared  that Capitalism, though filthy, is the only way to industrialise his state because the government does not have resources to build steel plants.

I wish people made up their minds about what does not have the resources to build steel plants. In Nehru’s time, they used to say that the government should build steel plants because the private sector would not have resources to do so.  So they imposed capacity restrictions to stop private companies from building steel plants they did not have resources to build in the first place. Now, we are being told the opposite. I am, like totally confused.

Now, of course Bhattacharjee, being a good Marxist, must believe that Communism is the last stage of human evolution and as a matter of historical inevitability, must necessarily be preceded by Capitalism. As India has not gone through a Capitalist stage yet, it is entirely possible that he believes that Communism cannot come to India yet. Some people believe that Kalki will come on earth when the sins of Kali yuga burden Earth to her breaking point. Ergo, the way to hasten the arrival of Kalki is to sin so much that He is forced to incarnate. I shudder to think what will happen to Capitalism in Bhattacharjee’s hands.  

In Defence of Intuition

Should we execute writers of computer viruses? (link via Amit.) I believe that we shouldn’t, but let me dispose of the invalid reason first – the reason that goes “We cannot put a number on human lives!” We make choices about our own lives all the time. Every time I spend a rupee on pleasure, I take it away from my future medical fund, money that could save my life some day. “Putting numbers” on human lives just involves quantifying choices we make routinely, not descending to a new level of moral depravity.

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Hindu Rate of Growth

I see that the phrase “Hindu Rate of Growth” evokes strong emotion in some quarters.  Gaurav wants Hindus to flinch when they hear that phrase. I do flinch, not because I am a Hindu, but because I am a member of the Cartel. The phrase is one of the Cartel’s worst nightmares – a bad pun gone horribly wrong.  As a service to humanity, I shall explain the origins of the phrase.

The culprit, the originator of the phrase was an economist named Raj Krishna. I do not know where he stood on the pseudo-secular scale, but he was a free market supporter and also presumably a punster. If the Cartel had existed at that time, he would have found sanctuary among us poor misunderstood souls.

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Good Really Old Days

This is Survivorship Bias week at The Examined Life.

Hunter-gatherers may have been so lithe and healthy because the weak were dead. The invention of agriculture and the advent of settled society merely swapped high mortality for high morbidity, allowing people some relief from chronic warfare so they could at least grind out an existence, rather than being ground out of existence altogether.

Notice a close parallel with the industrial revolution. When rural peasants swapped their hovels for the textile mills of Lancashire, did it feel like an improvement? The Dickensian view is that factories replaced a rural idyll with urban misery, poverty, pollution and illness. Factories were indeed miserable and the urban poor were overworked and underfed. But they had flocked to take the jobs in factories often to get away from the cold, muddy, starving rural hell of their birth.

That is from the Economist once again. Here is something I posted on my blog four years ago.

(A tip: The Christmas special issue of the Economist is always worth reading. Lots of interesting stuff. )

Survival Bias in Home Appliances

Dilip D’Souza documents his recent misfortunes in home appliances and implies, (but as is typical for him, never says) that the quality of appliances has declined since the glorious period of Nehruvian socialism. That reminds me of a Fark.com discussion thread I was hanging around in a couple of months back when the bridge collapsed in Minnesota. I can’t be bothered to find the thread right now, but here is what I remember.

Someone on the thread had brought up the example of Roman bridges. Why is it that bridges built by the Romans are still standing, while bridges built in modern times collapse within two decades?

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The Expert Cook and the Adequate Cook

Once, when I was trying to cook, it occurred to me that while while it is hard work to gain expertise in cooking, it must be easy to be an adequate cook. Well, obviously, but my reasoning is more interesting than the conclusion.

The recipe for the typical dish specifies the ingredients and the methods with great precision.  But the typical dish has evolved over hundreds of years through times and places that were less well-stocked than the present times.  It follows then, that the path to the present-day dish must be littered with hundreds of other variations of this dish most of which lack, or contain less of, one or more ingredients; and must have been prepared by a slightly different method because it was cooked in a time with a different technology. Which is more, all those variations must be edible, because someone indeed ate them and survived.

I think there is a moral somewhere here… perhaps realising this will help us turn a better cook, because it will relieve us of the fear of failure. Or something.

In the Model Village. Part II

 Part I

“Yes, you can lend money as many times as you wish, but what interest do you charge for the money?” The cabbie asked.

“Well, I charge whatever I can get. ”

“Which is?”

“In the beginning, it was quite high. There had been no development in the village for years. I checked out the first entrepreneur’s business proposal and saw that his factory, because it would be the first factory to produce whatever it was producing, would make obscene profits. So I adjusted my cut accordingly.”

“What happened then?”

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