When the Dravidian movement was conceived, was it ever intended that the whole of South India would come under its ambit? Did anyone take any ideological or political steps towards that goal?
The Fallacy of the Fallacy of Division
Lekhni wants to know what was wrong with Falstaff referring to the the Fallacy of Division in his post. Thinking through the Boeing 747 example in the Wikipedia article should make the problem clear. Yes, the fact that a jet plane can fly across the Atlantic does not mean that its individual parts can fly independently across the Atlantic. That is because while a jet plane is composed of its individual parts, a part of a plane is not the plane. While we can have interesting philosophical debates about how many parts one has to remove from a plane for it to cease being a plane, the point is that an engine of an aeroplane is not an aeroplane.
NREGA Propaganda
For the past month or so, the Central Government has been spamming NDTV with ads targeted at landless villagers, explaining to them, sometimes in Hindi, sometimes in English, the benefits of the NREGS, how the scheme means that they no longer have to migrate to cities, how it also means that women and men get the same pay for the same work, and how they should guard themselves against muster roll fraud.
The ads are as good as we expect government ads to be, but NDTV?
Unclear on the Concept
None of this is to suggest, of course, that women are as a group, more likely to be concerned about women’s rights than men (or, in other words, the probability that a given individual will be sympathetic towards gender issues is higher if that individual is a woman). That, sadly, is still true. But one must guard against the fallacy of division that ascribes this property to every woman. That’s why the notion of the ‘first woman president’ is a largely meaningless one [1]. We have little or no reason to expect that a woman who is president will be, simply by the fact of being a woman, more responsive to gender issues than a man would be in her place [2]. (2x3x7)
One must also guard against the tendency to post Wikipedia links without actually reading them.
No More Posts This Week
I am sure you’ll survive.
Update: Okay, I lied.
Pragati’s Progress
The Feb edition of Pragati is out. Do visit and subscribe!
The Game of Monopoly
Google doesn’t like Microsoft’s offer to buy Yahoo, because they are afraid that Microsoft will challenge Google’s dominance in search.
Wait, that’s not correct. Google thinks that the deal will worsen Microsoft’s monopoly. I am, like totally confused.
Greatest Headline Hits -II
Gandhi, Churchill ‘myth’, Sherlock real for Britons
You have to read to the fourth paragraph to realise that by “Britons”, they mean “British teenagers”.
Bonus bad writing: The article seems to say that Florence Nightingale was fictional. I don’t know if it was ignorance or bad writing on the part of the writer.
Killing the Infant Industry Argument
We already saw the slaying of the “tariffs are good when you are growing!” argument last week. Today it is time to link to an explanation of why the “Infant Industry” argument is bogus. The job has been expertly done by Tim Harford in Forbes. Governments aren’t good at identifying which industries will turn out as winners in the global market place. The incentives that drive government officials drive them towards protecting aging industries, not growing ones.
Build Roads
I had once decided that if asked to write one of those schoolboy-type essays titled “If I became Prime Minister”, I would say that my agenda as the Premier would have just two items – reform the judiciary and build roads. It is but a slight exaggeration to say that every thing else will follow from that. Swaminathan Aiyar reports in today’s Swaminomics
that the second item of my agenda is indeed as important as I think it is. Ten lakh rupees spent on building good roads bring 335 people out of poverty, more than any comparable spending.
I had thought that if the NREGA had one redeeming feature, it was that infrastructure, specifically roads, would be built as a result. Alas, that is not to be:
For decades, rural roads in India were neglected by most states. Besides, rural employment schemes, starting with Maharashtra’s Employment Gurantee Scheme in the 1970s, created the illusion that durable rural roads could be built with labour-intensive techniques. In practice labour-intensive roads proved not durable at all, and those built in the dry season vanished in the monsoons.
This finally changed with the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY) launched in 2000. This, for the first time, ordained mechanised techniques to provide high-quality, all-weather roads to 1.6 lakh rural habitations without pucca roads. It also upgraded roads that had collapsed. Panchayats were made responsible for maintenance. Conversations with experts suggest that this is one of the best-functioning programmes in rural development.
In 2004, the UPA government launched Bharat Nirman, an ambitious infrastructure programme for rural areas. It aims to provide connectivity by having a pucca road, electricity, telecom and drinking water in every village of over 1,000 people. This overlapped with the PMGSY. Progress on Bharat Nirman has been spotty. But rural connectivity has at last become a high government priority, and this bodes well for the future.
The Undersea Cables
Wired has a good roundup of the news related to the two fibre optic undersea cables snapping. There is also a link to a rather long article on the history of undersea cables written by one of my favourite writers – Neal Stephenson – when the first cable was laid.
And does anyone know why I am not affected at all sitting here in Hyderabad? Neither my home nor my office connection is affected. Office connection I can understand, but home?
On the Eggs
Jai Choorakkot wants to know whether my attack on Dilip D’Souza amounts to a defence of reforms. That is a fair question to ask. One of my pet peeves is that people believe that a successful counter-attack amounts to a defence of their own position. I’ve myself come down quite sharply on people whose defence of Mao amounted to saying that I am a hypocrite because I supposedly support Kissinger (or Pinochet – it was not clear who) So let’s accept that my attack on Dilip was an attack on Dilip, and move on to the question of reforms.