I had planned to make this post when the elections, which seemed inevitable at that time, were declared.  Unfortunately, it turns out that we will not have the elections after all. But I might as well make it.

Every time an election is held in our country, opinion polls try to predict the result. Virtually every time, they get their call wrong – even the exit polls. This fact will invariably be presented by our pundits with a sense of wonder that is usually reserved for divine miracles.  The people of India, it will be said, have kept their cards close to their chest, and though illiterate and uneducated, have managed to fool all the pollsters to give their verdict.

Once the election concludes, the Popular Will, which could not be discerned by the hundreds of surveyors who went around the country questionnaire in hand, is instantly understood by the pundits even when they are half-way around the world and columnists for the New York Times.  Two weeks before the elections, the best scientific models are unable to answer the simple factual question of which way the results will sway. But a day after the results are known, everyone knows, without any need for evidence, what went on in the minds of the people as they were voting.

That is how the common wisdom that the general elections of 2004 were a popular vote against the reforms came about. That is also how everyone knows that Chandrababu Naidu was voted out because he neglected the villages at the cost of Hyderabad. (Why did he win once then? No one knows.)

If we are honest with ourselves, we will have to admit that no one has a clue about which way the Indian voters vote, and once they have voted, the process of translating the votes to seats makes it pretty much impossible to draw a causal chain between the intention of the voter and the “Popular Will” as expressed via the seat position in the legislature.  

If pollsters and pundits cannot call an election a month in advance, it is very likely that those in the government will be unable to take a guess as to which policies will win them the next election five years away. If democracy means that rulers govern according to the will of the people, then India’s democracy is broken.

The WSJ has a rather negative article on Linux penetration in desktops. Apparently Torvalds’ father and sister use Windows.  Far more interesting is the accompanying interview with Torvalds where he points out that desktops simply do not matter any more.

I suspect Vista is doing well enough — I think the problems with it are more indicative of the maturing market than anything else. The desktop market in general simply has a very high inertia, and while a Microsoft update obviously ends up having a lot of the advantages of that inertia, I think Microsoft is also noticing that the inertia can work against them.

So I don’t think Vista will “fail” or anything like that. But if I was Microsoft, I’d realize that this whole “let’s redesign everything” mentality just doesn’t work in a maturing market. And we may not be there yet, but the whole operating system thing is definitely turning into a commodity, not a “bells and whistles” kind of thing.

I think that some time soon, Microsoft will collapse under the burden of keeping its products compatible with previous versions and keeping all its products compatible with one another.  The loose couplings that are the hallmark of  OS software used to be a pain so far, but will soon prove an advantage.

A hospital had organized a free health check-up for us overworked IT employees. It turns out that I have slightly less blood sugar than is ideal and am slightly heavier than I should be. To fix the first problem, I should consume sweet stuff more frequently and that will worsen the second problem. What should I do?

I apologize.  I could not find time to put together this week’s edition of The Examined Week. However, I do not want to leave my readers in great anxiety, so I pass on the following message from the Jagadguru:

Sorry guys. I haven’t approved the comments since past several weeks. The comments got accumulated so much (mostly spam) and I had a tough time clearing it off. Finally, I have cleared it and I hope I didn’t miss any important comment when deleting the spam. I apologize if I had deleted any of your comments.

This year’s Economics Nobel was awarded for work on something called “Mechanism Design”.  I hadn’t heard of the term, but I realized that I knew something about the topic. Designing auctions is a fascinating exercise. Slight changes in rules can lead to drastic changes in outcomes.

Kishore Biyani, head of Big Bazaar, Pantaloons, etc. has a mechanism which can work only for him or someone like him.  When looking at a property to start his next shop, he gives the other guy one chance to quote the rent. If he likes the price, he takes it. If he does not, he walks away. Because everyone knows that there will be no second chance and because a Pantaloons or a Big Bazaar is a sought-after component of a mall, the counterparty has every incentive to quote the lowest possible rate.

I learnt this factoid in the fascinating, but badly written book “It happened in India”, which I picked up because it was available at a Big Bazaar checkout counter for 99 rupees.  Add that to my review queue.

Welcome to The Examined Week,  a collection of reading matter published on the web in the past week*, published every Friday afternoon.

Dilip D’Souza writes:

In other words, what I hope this judgement sheds light on is the whole sickening culture of police “encounters”, and the widespread societal approval for them. Dreaded gangsters or not, the police cannot be allowed to shoot them down, and cannot be allowed to get away with shooting them down. But once we do allow them to do those things, we had better be prepared for murders like on that day in 1997: murders of perfectly ordinary folks like you and me.

Yes, it could have been you in that car that day. Because of Justice Kumar, there’s just that much less chance that it might be you, bullet-ridden dead in another car, tomorrow. Think of it like that.

The Economist calls for flexible labour laws in India:

This partly explains why most firms are so small: 87% of employment in Indian manufacturing is in firms with fewer than ten employees, compared with only 5% in China. Small firms cannot reap economies of scale or exploit the latest technology, and so suffer from lower productivity than big firms.

Andy Mukherjee writes on  the joke that the NREGS is. You have of course already read Amit Varma on the same subject.

Ajay Shah writes that it is not that the Rupee is appreciating, but that the dollar is depreciating –   an important distinction. He also abuses the RBI.

The mysterious and anonymous blogger Indian maverick analyses the failure of the nuclear deal.

Niranjan Rajadhyaksha writes  about Radiohead’s voluntary pricing model and what it means. On that note, check out the Marginal Revolution poll about what readers paid. It also turns out that more people pirate it than download it for free.

Tyler Cowen looks at a paper that investigates whether the caste system was economically efficient.

Sandeep surveys  Rama in Tamil tradition.

Megan McArdle, the smartest woman alive, writes about the theory and practice. She also has two posts [1], [2] on the implications of  the disappearing family.

Finally, the Jagadguru wishes constipation upon Rajinikanth:

Seriously, is Rajini asking K to talk to Rama and sort out the matter? Already this fool is dumbing the previously dumb Indians with his movies like Baba. Now this. It is high time this nutcase is ignored by the masses and shown his way out. He has messed up with the “illiterates” of Tamilnadu with Babas and Chandramukhis. It is time he shuts his butt out and stays away from anything other than his crap called acting.

*”Past week” will be defined as loosely as I please

You never get rid of the Dane.

The discussion on the collapse of the Punjagutta flyover in Hyderabad some time back had turned into a debate on civic infrastructure in India and on why New Delhi has much better infrastructure than other cities.  My argument:

• It is because New Delhi was built by the British.
• The British cared more about civic infrastructure than Indian politicians after independence.
• Yes, I know that they built better civic infrastructure for their selfish reasons, but that does not alter the point.  They built better infrastructure. Current Indian politicians do not have any incentive, selfish or selfless, to build cities.
• By and large, all the cities built by the British – Bombay, Calcutta and Madras have held up better than the cities that came up after independence. But Delhi is the best planned of these, because it was the last one that the British built and the only one that was built after the advent of the car. Plus, they had special reason to build, being the capital and all.
• It will be an interesting exercise to compare the cities the British built with the capitals of the better-governed princely states, like Mysore and Hyderabad old city. I’d expect that the British and the princes would face similar incentives.

Discuss.

The current issue of The Economist has some important articles on the growing disparity between the rich and the poor in China.  Please read them.

The current issue of The Economist  has an important article on how lapdancers make more in tips when they are ovulating.