Amit has written about  this attempt by the Indian government to set up a “second Silicon Valley” in the US.  It is of course a bad idea, as government attempts to fund things generally are. But this one puzzled me quite a bit. Apparently, the rationale is that the first Silicon Valley in California, is overcrowded, so they are setting up the second valley to explore new markets in New Jersey and Chicago.

 Wait, what? Has software increased so much in bulk that there is now a need to reduce transport costs by producing it close to its point of consumption? Why do they need to set up a second Silicon Valley in New Jersey to explore markets in New Jersey? Reading the article again makes the subterfuge clear. They have not mentioned anywhere that they will be setting up development centres, only “incubation centres”.  If I were to guess, what they will be actually doing is to set up marketing offices in those areas. They can’t tell the government: “Give us some money so that we can set up marketing offices”. So they dressed it up as “Give us some money so that we can set up Silicon Valley II”. The government has bought the line and so has the idiot reporter.

Apologies for the lack of posts. I shall be in New Jersey for the next two weeks. I may find a lot of time to post, or I may not.  In the former case, the blog will be updated quite often. In the latter case, it will not.

It transpires that a momentous blogospheric event occurred three days back. However, the parties involved being models of maturity and discretion, the public is so far unaware of the news. Unfortunately, I being a model of neither, feel impelled to make an announcement.

You folks might know that the Jagadguru gives liberally of His time and effort towards the endeavour to blog about right wing morons and the deficiencies of the Indian educational system. As there are so many right wing morons and so many deficiencies in India’s educational system, it is a thankless and never ending job. In the midst of His busy schedule, He also used to take time to blog on Blogbharti (the word is a pun). Unfortunately, on 12 September 2007, He decided to discontinue His participation in the noble task. Rather than explain the reasons myself, I shall let the Jagadguru Himself give His two reasons (of which the second is not a reason). He had made the post and then deleted it because, as we have already seen, the Jagadguru is a model of maturity and discretion. Unfortunately, Google reader’s crawler was inexcusably indiscreet.

A Russian feminist has proposed a solution to the problem of Russia’s falling population – import Indian men as husbands. (via)

Banking is one of the most regulated industries in India. A bank needs RBI approval before opening every single branch. K. V. Kamath, CEO of ICICI Bank wants branch licensing to be liberalised – for his bank of course, not for foreign banks. What did you think?

Two years back, Aadisht (the smartest human being alive, outsmarted in intelligence only by the Jagadguru who is beyond comparison and, don’t forget, is the most important leftist blogger of our times) had written a post taking issue with Utsa Patnaik’s claim that the poor have less food than before the reforms.

He had pointed out that while they were eating less cereals than before, they were eating more of everything else – i.e. their diet had was getting richer. This is a common phenomenon. As people start affording more, they eat less of bhakri ki roti or ganji and more of vegetables and meat. At that time he got a lot of flak for the claim, and it turned out that he had not actually looked at the data sliced by income levels. Aadisht changed his blogging software after that and his posts are lost to the world, a great loss to humanity.

But nonetheless, it turns out that he was right. The poorest are eating less coarse cereals, more rice and wheat, more fruits and vegetables and more meat, fish and eggs. They are eating more of those things because their incomes have gone up and their tastes have changed. The proof can be found in the notorious free market fundamentalist publication, the Economic and Politcal Weekly (pdf link, will stay good for four months I think. After that, leave me your email and I’ll send you the file.)

The back story to this collapse is that the flyover has been taking forever to construct and is a source of traffic snarls that only Hyderabadis can create. When Chief Minister Rajasekhara Reddy was asked why it wasn’t getting constructed, he promised to “take action” against Gammon India, a fairly reputable firm that was in charge of construction. But almost immediately the bureaucrats began to hush up the matter, because it turned out that Gammon, while nominally in charge, had merely lent its name to the construction, while sub-contracting the actual work to other firms who had got the job only because of their connections to Congress politicians. All this was in the news a couple of months ago.

Does anyone remember that Reddy came to power because Chandrababu Naidu was supposedly not performing? At least Naidu was trying. What an awful Chief Minister this man is turning out to be. Among other things, he wilfully ignored warnings of impending terrorist strikes. He went soft on the Naxalites. He has an utterly cynical approach to government that is scary, but not surprising.

You know, the sort where he has disciples who follow him, hear him talk, hang on to every word and take down notes. It is an incalculable loss to society otherwise. It is terribly inefficient to expect him to write out his ideas in a blog, as I am sure his typing is a bottleneck that chokes the flood of ideas.

Anyway, that was the impression I got when I, along with others met Nitin on Saturday. I also accompanied him to the Gates of Paradise and got a free bottle of orange juice.

One of my favourite quotes from “Yes Minister” goes:

An aggressive question is like fast bowling. Unless it is deadly accurate, one can use its pace against itself.

It is a favourite quote because the Blogosphere reminds me of it quite often. The latest to remind me of it is Ritwik Priya’s “fisking” in two parts [1,2 (via)] of Niranjan Rajadhyaksha’s rather innocuous article in Mint about how schools should allow children to specialize. Ritwik accuses him of, among other things, misusing Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage.

Now, if you plan to accuse a trained economist of misusing basic economic concepts, your own concepts better be deadly accurate, or they’ll be hit for a four at third man. But this is what Ritwik says:

Ricardo’s theory is one of the most insightful in the entire field of classical and neoclassical microeconomics but it makes certain assumptions, namely

1) There is free trade of goods (explicit)
2) There is no trade of labour or capital, i.e factor inputs (explicit)
3) The demand for the traded products is reasonably similar (implicit, because what is actually being measured is the opportunity cost)

Here, the ‘good’ that his daughter will specialise in is a certain level of competence in a field or a subject. It is thus safe to assume that the free trade assumption holds true. However, the second and the third assumptions are not true. The factor inputs in this case are aptitude and capital (the investment into the education to gain these skills) and on the individual level, capital can easily be traded. The situation will hence move towards absolute advantage. The product that her daughter, or anybody for that matter, will get in return for their skills is money. Money has a high demand almost universally. The same is not true for the product traded in return – i.e skills.

Can you count how many things are wrong in this?
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While we are on maps, the Economist is calling for the country of Belgium to end its existence, unmindful of the potential problems for itself.

THERE is no surer way for The Economist’s Asia section to cause offence than to publish a map. Almost any cartographic representation of the continent is bound to upset some individual reader or government. Alas, we use maps not to portray the world as it ought to be, or even as we would like it to be, but as it is.

Angered most often, to judge by its actions, is the government of India. Our maps that include the disputed territory of Kashmir (see image below) show it carved up into Indian, Pakistani and Chinese areas of control. Every time we print one, every single issue of the magazine distributed in India is defaced with an official stamp. The government thinks it important to inform readers that the external boundaries of India as depicted are “neither correct nor authentic”.

Some readers in India seem to suspect us of malice: perhaps we publish such maps purely to irk the authorities and add to the overtime earnings of the hard-pressed stampers. The truth is more benign: in using “the line of control” that divides Kashmir in the absence of an agreed international frontier we are merely noting the status quo, not endorsing it. In practical terms, too, India’s own maps, on which Kashmir is entirely Indian, are hardly helpful to the uninformed. Any foreign traveller seeking to make what looks like a short hop from Srinagar in Indian-administered Kashmir to Muzaffarabad in the Pakistani part would find himself having to make a very long detour. (source)

Kinley?