In the Model Village. Part I

Long long ago, nestled among the mountains, there was a village perfectly isolated from the rest of civilization. Its inhabitants led a hand to mouth existence. Because this village always behaved according to our macroeconomic models, it was called “The Model”.

Now, in The Model, villagers used gold coins, and only gold coins for trading. They used gold for nothing else. The total number of gold coins in The Model was fixed.

But gold coins were cumbersome to lug around and exchange with each other. So one day, a wise villager named Arjun Banker (or AB for short) made them an offer. He told them to deposit all their gold coins with him. He would maintain their titles to the gold coins. Whenever they wished to make a transaction, they could inform him and he would transfer the titles to the gold as needed.

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Zero is a Fraction Too

Anonymous Coward wants to know what exactly is wrong with the logic in the paragraph I linked to below.  Let me explain:

Rothbard claims that when I open a current or savings account with the bank (“checking account” or “demand deposit” for you Americans)  the bank is implicitly promising to keep the money locked up in its vault, which means that lending it out constitutes fraud. I don’t see how that makes sense. The bank is only promising to pay me my money on demand. How it manages to do it is the bank’s business.

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Socialism’s About Turn

Aadisht points to the latest version of the old bad idea: Nationalising rivers.  This is the time to pimp my old solution to the Kaveri dispute which still has a better chance of working than everything else that is being tried now.

In this post, however, I want to ask supporters of this idea: Why do you think nationalising rivers will work? This is old style socialism of course, which advocates central planning, and it does not work of course.

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Gujarat Predictions

Two contradictory predictions about Gujarat:

  1. Modi will win comfortably, because he was never in trouble. It was media bias that made journalists see rebellions where there were mere rumblings.
  2. The exit polls are overestimating Modi’s votes for the same reason they underestimated Mayavati’s votes  – those who voted against him are less likely to say that they did.

Which is your pick?

Khoya Khoya Chand

I went to watch it for its title song. The first time I heard it, it gave me such a thrill that I almost caused an accident by speeding.

Sudhir Mishra has taken great care to make the milieu authentic. To savour the authenticity was one of the joys of the movie. Why, in the late 50s, would a retired star be speaking Hinglish? Ah, she is almost certainly an Anglo-Indian.  Is she opening the notebook from the wrong end? Ah no, the script is in Urdu, of course. Probably the only departure from authenticity was that an actress in those times wouldn’t have the screen name of Nikhat – or Mahjabeen Bano…

But the story wasn’t very captivating, I am afraid – and Soha Ali Khan is at most adequate as an actress.

And, does someone know what exactly Kamal Amrohi’s problem with his father was? I distinctly remember that there was something, but I can’t remember what it was.

Unclear on the Concept

I tend to write after thinking, which makes writing difficult. Usually, what I actually put on the screen is a fraction of the thinking I do on a subject.  Which is why I am in utter awe of someone who can write like this:

Solutions for Reducing Corruption
=================================

1. Replace the Fiat currency system with more viable energy based currency system. Replace the Fractional Reserve Banking with absolute reserve banking this can be done by introducing online clearing of cheque and all banks has to settle the outstanding on weekly basis, so that banks are not able to create money from thin air through book entries, they can only loan out money they have as deposit or equity. This will enable better allocation of resources and better distribution of wealth and will result in reduction of corruption in the society.

There is more in that fine comment, all of it completely meaningless.

The History of Bathing

Longtime readers of The Examined Life know about my deep and abiding interest in the sanitary habits of Americans. It has now come to my attention that a useful addition to the corpus of research on this subject has been made.  One  Katherine Ashenburg* has written an entire book on the history of personal hygiene in the West. The book is called The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History. Apparently, in the West, the practice of taking a bath daily is a modern one – for much of the last millenium, a monthly bath was the norm. In this, they differed from every other civilization – and in fact, the Christians had a reputation for uncleanness among the Muslims and Jews. Ashenburg blames Christianity for this, as apparently the religion placed much less emphasis on ritual cleanness than other religions like Islam or Hinduism. I am generally sceptical of such explanations  – Islam, Judaism and Hinduism developed in much warmer climates where you sweat a lot more, undressing is not a life-threatening experience and splashing cool water on yourself is actually pleasant.  To check the influence of Christianity, one needs to look at the rituals of cleanliness in other civilizations in the same belt, like Tibetan Buddhism, Confucianism and Shintoism… umm.. so I guess I am wrong in my scepticism.

There is no word on whether the book discusses the strange reluctance of the Americans to use bidets.

*Yes, she is the same person who wrote this article.

Response: More on Strict Liability

No, I haven’t given up on responding to the strict liability comments.  Here, I respond to two comments by Ritwik:

There are some tradeoffs involved here. For example, if a ‘bribe the inspector’ system exists, it’s becaue it is economically attractive – that is the amount of the bribe will typically be lower than the amount required to install the fire safety systems. Thus, there is no automatic incentive for a theatre owner to improve the safety requirements if the inspectors are removed.

My dear Ritwik!  What makes you think that fire safety is just a matter of installing safety equipment? What makes you think that any government regulation is designed to be easy to follow? My mother used to work in a small scale company and had to fend off these inspectors, and believe me, complying with the rules is simply not an option. Unless you pay them off, they will always be able to find a violation and harass you, even if the the violation is just using ink of the wrong colour in the quarterly fire drill report.

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Invitation:Hindutva Essay Contest

The Examined Life is hosting an essay contest open only to self-described supporters of Hindutva. Please write a thousand word essay on any of the following topics:

  1. In the India of my dreams,  M F Hussain will be in jail and Taslima Nasreen will be granted Indian citizenship.
  2. In the India of my dreams, both M F Hussain and Taslima Nasreen will be free to speak their minds.
  3. In the India of my dreams, there will be no pseudo-secular people, no militant Islamists, no leftists and no children of Macaulay. So the question of what to do about M F Hussain and Taslima Nasreen will not arise, because there will be no one left to ask the question.
  4. In the India of my dreams, there will be no pseudo-secular people, no militant Islamists, no leftists and no children of Macaulay. As Hindutva is less of a philosophy and more of a debating tactic to point out the hypocrisy of everyone else in the world, Hindutva won’t exist either.
  5. I cannot write an essay on topics 1 to 4, because the person who is setting the contest has not set a similar essay contest for pseudo-secular people, militant Islamists, leftists and for children of Macaulay. This means that there is no need for me to explain how Hindutva translates to public policy.

If you write the essay, please leave a trackback or a comment. Judges and prizes to be announced later.

Tea Leaves Blocking a Sink – I

I am starting a new series. The theme will be clear if you can decipher the title of this post and recognise the allusion.  The first person to guess the allusion gets a big hug from me… if you want it, that is.

For many, governance post-1991 is a simple shift to map. Uncomplicated marketisation, privatisation and other -ations and -isms have invaded all spheres of our lives and made the state and all else redundant. I don’t think the picture is this simple. Easy as the pleasure of the damning critique is, and ample the ammunition to do so is, “neoliberalism writ large” offers us little nuance and even less hope. As a great fan of hope, let me suggest another track. Much more useful is an analysis of how an economic logic has entered and shaped our politics, insitutions, and notions of justice and citizenship. We must look, therefore, not for a “neoliberal” state and economy, but a state that uses technologies and techniques of neoliberalism, selectively and not always with full control, and not without other logics and motivations in contexts that vary greatly. Spotting these techniques in particular sites offers us the first articulations of effective counter-discourses. Sometimes, this is a far easier task than one might imagine. Sometimes your prime minister simply questions democracy in a leading daily. (source)