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?

Ramachandra Guha (via) writes that the Indian public opinion has is changing its preference for icons from Gandhi and Nehru to supporters of violent revolution like Savarkar, Bhagat Singh and Bose. I disagree with the notion that any real change in attitude has occurred. It is more likely that those attitudes have come to the fore among English speakers. We are also much less polite to national icons than our parents were, so instead of saying “Gandhi was a great man, though he had some flaws”, it is much more acceptable to say “Gandhi was an idiot”. But there was always a substantial faction that preferred violent revolution to the non-violent movement that took place.

Was that faction right? Would we have gained independence faster if our great-grand parents had staged a violent revolution? I think that the answer to that is yes, but no, there was no chance at all that a violent revolution could have taken place on a scale that would have forced the British to leave.

I don’t want to minimize the suffering and sacrifices that the freedom fighters went through – enduring prison and lathi charges, staying away from their families, not being able to complete their education – all these were no jokes. But I doubt if a sufficient number would have been motivated to take the far greater risks that an insurgent or a terrorist movement would have entailed. Bad as the British rule was, the things they did were not so bad that it generated the level of outrage required, especially among the educated, who would be the leaders of the revolution.

There were some exceptions of course – the most significant one was Jalianwala bagh – I don’t think that it is a coincidence that Punjab gave birth to the most number of violent revolutionaries.

Secondly, a violent movement would probably have alienated the people. Even with the best care the revolutionaries could take to avoid targeting “civilians”, if the movement had reached a large scale, causing difficulties to the uninvolved population would have been unavoidable. Also, the revolutionaries would be mostly fighting other Indians – they would have lost public sympathy quite soon, just as the Punjab terrorists started losing sympathy when the dead bodies of policemen returned to their villages. Again, this has to do with the nature of the British rule. If the British had been really brutal rulers, ordinary Indians would have put up with considerable amount of difficulties. But they weren’t that brutal.

Finally, any violent movement that goes on for long runs the risk of going out of control. If you have a gun, the temptation to turn it on your own people, or to turn it on your comrades for trivial reasons, is huge. Witness the Naxalites, the LTTE or any movement that started with understandable intentions.

So notwithstanding my contempt for the rest of Gandhiji’s views, I must say that keeping the freedom movement as a non-violent mass movement was a masterstroke.

A five page interview. Go read.

I really feel that for somebody who loves software and is a good developer, there’s a lot of benefit to working in a software company, mainly because the things that you know about and are good at are directly aligned with the things that the business is good at and the kinds of things that you get promoted for. But, actually, banking is sort of interesting, because when it comes right down to it, 95 percent of what you’re doing actually is information technology in a certain way. Even a derivative is a form of code in some ways, although there’s a trading aspect to it as well. So it’s actually conceivable in the banking industry that somebody who started out as a developer might be promoted to the point of actually running a bank – and that has happened. So, you don’t feel completely misaligned.

On the other hand, if you go to an entertainment company as a software developer, such as when I was at Viacom working on MTV, or any other kinds of companies such as insurance, you’re really a subcontractor/service provider. The things you think about every day are not the same things that the CEO thinks about writ small; they’re actually a very different kind of thing

…

There aren’t many books on the state of the art in software development and software management right now, which are the kinds of things that I like to write and read about. Unfortunately, we haven’t moved beyond the anecdote phase, and attempts to move beyond the anecdote phase are usually just anecdotes with statistics.

Part of the problem is there really isn’t a science going on here, which is very frustrating. The same applies to an awful lot of business writing. It’s very easy to write a book called, for example, The Starbucks Principle or The Dell Way, and just bring up a whole bunch of random anecdotes and somehow tie them together thematically and pretend that this is a real thing that you can do and be successful at.

And, lo and behold, another moron then is going to try to attempt the same thing in his or her own company. It doesn’t work because it doesn’t apply or because it didn’t work in the original company, either – it’s just an anecdote that somebody pulled out of thin air. That’s one of the problems that this particular field has been suffering from.

…

The interesting thing that I discovered is that people often underestimate. But you might think they overestimate, too, so if you have 10 things to do, just add up all those estimates and some of them will be late and some of them will be early, and you should still end up with the same date. You’ll make up for the late ones by doing other things early.

But when you think about software tasks, when things go wrong, they take three or four times longer than expected. If I told you I’ve got an eight-hour feature, it’s about eight hours of work. Now, could it take eight hours? Yes. Could it take six hours? Sure. Could it take two days? Definitely. Could it take a week? Yes, probably with a 10 percent probability because you’ve discovered some huge problem, and it’s a new thing you have to write code for, and you just completely forgot about it and it’s going to take you a week.

Now, could it take zero? No, that’s impossible. Could it take negative 32 hours? It could never take negative 32 hours. You can go over 32 hours; you just can’t go under by 32 hours because that would cause you to go backwards in time.

The last bit reminds me that I need to read Fooled By Randomness…

The post at Churumuri has gained some fame. It contains the line:

90 per cent: The Asian Development Bank said two years ago that “at least 90 percent of people” live on less than $1 a day in India, China and some Southeast Asian countries.

This is what the actual article says:

At least 90 percent of people living on less than $1 a day live in India, China and some Southeast Asian countries.

Come on people! We are Indians. We invented the decimal system! And the zero! It is not that hard.

It is stated in our scriptures that truthful words should be celebrated, even when uttered unconsciously or in jest. Those who do not believe in His greatness should now repent! How else will one explain this?

We should get rid of our totally counterproductive anti-dumping laws, and allow Asia’s manufacturing biggies to just dump their goods at rock bottom prices: Barbies, GI Joes and Holi water guns, bicycles, motorbikes and cars, computers, mobile phones and MP3 players, … ! It makes perfect sense because manufacturing accounts for only a small share of our GDP and employs a far smaller workforce than our agricultural does. On the other hand, we have a BILLION consumers who have a gucking-fod-given right to enjoy their cheap toys and low-priced gadgets and dumped cars!

In “Yes Minister” (or “Yes Prime Minister”) there is this priceless sequence:

Hacker: I have been a minister (or Prime Minster) for a week now.
Humphrey Appleby: And you’ve been a very successful minister, if I may say so.
Hacker: How do we ensure that this run of success continues?
Appleby: May I suggest masterly inactivity?
Hacker: But a minister ought to be firm.
Appleby: How about firm masterly inactivity?

I am off on a vacation and will return on September 4. Expect masterly inactivity on this blog till then.

Aadisht, who I have annointed one of the smartest Cartelians, is on to something in this post. I think that we can generalize the problem. In India, we are poor at closing the design feedback loop. We are good at theory. We have very good practical thinkers, but we do badly when it comes to formulating theories based on practice and then applying the theory to see if it works in practice.

I could think of many structural reasons for this, but I am short of time and want to stir up controversy, so I will blame the caste system. The Brahminical attitude that thinkers and actors should be different is responsible for this.

Those who were interested in the post on Genes and economic development will be interested in what Tyler Cowen has to say about the subject. Cowen is running a book club and the book is the first one he is reviewing. I haven’t followed the discussion very closely as I lack time right now, but it seems to me that Greg Clark commited the fallacy that I pointed out and avoided in my seminal work on the Cause of Unhappiness.

I declare that Aadisht is one of the smartest members of the Cartel, and by extension one of the smartest human beings alive. There are other extremely smart people on the pro-free market side of the blogosphere, such as my friend Neelakantan, but Aadisht is one of the smartest.

The Lefty side of the Blogosphere is of course handicapped by the presence of the Jagadguru who, like a permanent nuclear explosion, displays the brilliance of a thousand suns thereby outshining the intelligence of everyone in His vicinity. The Jagadguru is the only being who has escaped the ravages of the Indian education system and retained His capacity for critical thinking, which indicates just how smart He is.