Classic

The Technical Analysts

These days, one of the great joys of my life is watching the stock markets fall. I don’t get much time to watch TV, but I follow the collapse of the market through the Rediff stocks page. The advantage of this page over other choices is that I get to read the prognostications of the “technical analysts”.  Their statements have a zen-like quality to them. For example, at 9:33 AM today,  Prakash Gaba, technical analyst has said:

 “If the market falls any further, a bounce can be expected”.

How profound!

Also, going by the evidence on this page, Ashwani Gujral, technical analyst is on CNBC Awaaz all  the time. I wonder if he gets time to do his job.

Defending Modi’s Honour is Unnecessary

Ritwik’s lament is that all his arguments with me devolve into nitpicking.  My response is, he starts it.  For example, in my post about terrorism, I model Narendra Modi as being interested only in votes, not in combating terrorism. Ritwik’s response to that is that while is interested in both fighting terrorism and winning elections, and when there is a conflict between the two, winning elections takes precedence. In FitW’s formulation of the same point, Modi considers winning elections his patriotic duty to keep the evil Congress at bay, and therefore considers short term setbacks in the fight against terrorism as acceptable collateral damage. 

This is an astonishingly subtle distinction, and I took some time to grasp it. The trouble is, this distinction has very little to do with my actual argument. 

Continue reading →

When Free Markets Are a Bad Thing

A year back, we were visiting my wife’s relatives. The head of the family, my wife’s uncle, used to be in the police force before he drank himself to death. 

As is the norm in these cases, his eldest son was given a job in the police department.  Of course, he had to pay a bribe for the job.  He got a discount because of his late father, but he wasn’t exempted. If the son had been a graduate, the amount would have been lower, but he would still have had to pay. 

And oh – he did not get an actual policing job. That would have cost him much more. He was given a clerical job in the department, dealing with personnel matters.  That cost lower. 

“I don’t suppose you have any opportunities to make extra money in this section?” I asked him.

Continue reading →

The Model of Law Enforcement

It so happens that  my article in Pragati is around 200 words shorter than it should have been, because it was supposed to be one of a set of 2, and had a reduced word limit than the normal Pragati article. Neither Nitin nor I are very strict about word counts while editing. If an article is well-written, we don’t care if it goes a couple of hundred words over. But while writing I am very very conscious about word limits. I set a target, constantly check my pace, and almost always ensure that I make the limit.  When it became clear that Karthik’s article was not going to arrive, I was thinking of revising my article a bit, but then I had to rush to the hospital. So if I had given myself another 200 words, I would have been able to cover some of points I am covering now.

Continue reading →

Beyond Parody

Yeah, I know that I should stop picking on random people on the net and argue with more substantive points, but…

But the Indian farmers who refuse to give up their land – and thwarted plans to build the world’s cheapest car in West Bengal — know one thing. As long as they have their land, their fate depends on the weather and the harvest. Once they leave their land, they face even greater uncertainties — from the job market to the world economy. Just like Singaporeans today. (Abhijit)

I suppose certain poverty is infinitely more preferable than fluctuating prosperity.

OK…

Why didn’t the Tatas (and others who extol the virtues of the free market) acquire their land on the open market? (Rahul Siddharthan)

Now let me get this straight. It is not enough for  Amit,  Shruti, me, the editors of the Mint, etc. to just write in support of property rights for farmers. We should have actually gone ahead and pooled our money and bought the land on the free market for Tata?

Me in Pragati

I have an article up in the October 2008 issue of Pragati. There I argue against Karthik’s post on statistics and terrorism. I argue that if we give a “free hand” to our police to fight terrorism without insisting that they obtain convictions from courts, we will not only end up with too many innocent victims, but also too few genuine terrorists. This was supposed to run in a debate format, with an article from Karthik and a response from me, but Karthik asked for a bailout at the last minute, which left only my article standing.

Missing the Point

Gaurav responds to a couple of my posts on democracy. He misses the point in both.

He claims that my argument that democracy provides stability for the rulers is incorrect, and cites the examples of Bhutto and Allende. Both were democratically elected and both were deposed and killed. These are puzzling counterexamples. It should have been clear from my posts that I do not classify a country as democratic just because it manages to elect its leaders in free elections once in a while. There is a great deal of truth in the statement that for a country to be  considered democratic, the test is not its first election, but the second.  To hold one election is easy. To hold the second one requires a significant amount of “infrastructure” in terms of cultural acceptance of orderly transition of power, a free press, a neutral military, etc. The coups that deposed Bhutto and Allende tell us that their countries were not democratic – by definition.

Continue reading →

Editor Type Answers

Nilakantan Rajaraman S wants to know my opinion as an editor to this piece. Very quickly:

  1. I don’t find it badly written.  It is not great writing, but if someone thrusts it before me and asks me to edit it, it will probably pass muster.
  2. But before it can be placed before me for editing, it has to pass a tollgate where someone decides whether to publish it or not. If I were that someone, I would not publish it. The hurdle is not quality of writing, but quality of the content.
  3. But the reason to publish something written by someone with the name of Sitaram Yechury is not the content. It is the name. His views will be published for the news content, if you know what I mean.