A lot more than LOL and BRB ... WSTS!

Ah, The Onion! (ht)

In god we trust ... no, not what you think this is about :)

America's Finest News Source lists the top ten prayers to get god's attention


Jon Stewart explains why we have no alternative but to trust god:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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India opens up with Pakistan--East and West

The report in the WSJ, from where I got the chart, adds:

There is huge room for growth in trade. In the year ended March 31, India exported $2.33 billion of goods to Pakistan. In the same period, Pakistan sold goods valued at $332.5 million in India, according to Indian government statistics.
By comparison, two-way trade between India and China, New Delhi's largest trading partner, is valued at more than $60 billion annually.

What a different story this would have been had these two countries not been caught up with the Kashmir issue and literally battled over it!

Meanwhile, Bangladesh-- the old East Pakistan--and India are finally getting around to the land and border issues that have confounded mapmakers; the hassle of enclaves:

EVER since Bangladesh achieved its independence in 1971, struggles over territory and terrorism, rather than the exchange of goods and goodwill, have dominated its relations with its mega-neighbour. Forty years on, both countries appear to be nearing an agreement to solve the insoluble—by swapping territory.

The planned exchange of parcels of each other’s territory is concentrated around some 200 enclaves. These are like islands of Indian and Bangladeshi territory surrounded completely by the other country’s land, clustered on either side of Bangladesh’s border with the district of Cooch Behar, in the Indian state of West Bengal. Surreally, these include about two dozen counter-enclaves (enclaves within enclaves), as well as the world’s only counter-counter enclave—a patch of Bangladesh that is surrounded by Indian territory…itself surrounded by Bangladeshi territory.

In a healthy sign:

For the people of the two tiny Bangladesh enclaves, history recently took a new turn. The iron gates of the Indian corridor connecting them with the mainland will now remain open round the clock.

On October 19, Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina declared the Tin Bigha Corridor formally open for 24 hours, heralding the end of nearly 64 years of captivity for its inhabitants. The right to unrestricted movement through the corridor was virtually open from September 8 when the two countries signed an agreement during Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit to Bangladesh.

Whatever the reasons, it took nearly four decades to see the full implementation of a historic agreement signed between Indira Gandhi and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in 1974 — three years after Bangladesh emerged on the world map dividing Pakistan with active Indian assistance.

Now, if only the Kashmir issue can be resolved!

Chart of the day: Banks too big to fail

As the global economy came crashing down and we all learnt the phrase "too big to fail," I had fun with it by threading this into athletics and academics:

The entire football team signed for a macroeconomics course, and none of them did any work at all, and didn't even show up for the tests.
The professor warned them that this could seriously affect their grades and, therefore, the eligibility to play, to which the quarterback answered .... "But, we are too big to fail" :)

But, that is a joke that didn't cost anybody any nickel.

The banks that were too big to fail cost us a whole lot.

This (ht) is how we got to the situation where:

The nation's 10 largest financial institutions hold 54 percent of our total financial assets; in 1990, they held 20 percent.

If everyone does what they love ...

... the economy will collapse tomorrow morning

That is pretty funny, and profound, especially given the source: Samantha Who?
Yes, that Christina Applegate sitcom, which is now in the rerun world :)

Sometimes I tell my students that I will do what I do even if I don't get paid, and that I am glad I get paid!  It is not often in life we are in situations when work is hobby and hobby is work.

More often than not, people end up doing whatever they can in order to earn their paychecks, and then drive around with "I would rather be fishing" bumper stickers.  As an old Sanskrit saying goes "उढर निमिथे बहु कृत वेशः" (I hope I got the Sanskrit spelling correctly!) which roughly translates to "for the sake of the stomach, many acts do we put on"

I suppose there is then this one thing I can always be thankful for every Thanksgiving.

Speaking of Thanksgiving, why do I by myself complete an ideal Thanksgiving party?
Because ...  I am both an Indian and an American :)

A Libertarian-Democrat I am

Through the long and winding road of time and geography, I paused at, and passed, quite a few religious and secular isms.  Over the last few years, I have comfortably settled into a Libertarian-Democrat perspective on society.

While the respect and value for the individual and the contempt for intrusion into lives fuel the Libertarian me, I can not see myself signing up ever as a full-fledged Libertarian, primarily because of the concern for the disadvantaged, and the worries over the power that the military-corporate alliance has--the triggers for the Democrat in me.

As is probably the case for many of us in this corner of the political spectrum, two intellectuals helped me a lot in arriving here (even if it was only my half-baked understanding): George Orwell and Robert Nozick.

It was, thus, a pleasure to read this lengthy critique of Nozick's philosophy, and of full-throated libertarianism. The final paragraphs are way too good to summarize:

Calling yourself a libertarian is another way of saying you believe power should be held continuously answerable to the individual's capacity for creativity and free choice. By that standard, Thomas Jefferson, John Ruskin, George Orwell, Isaiah Berlin, Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault, and even John Maynard Keynes are libertarians. (Orwell: "The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians." Keynes: "But above all, individualism … is the best safeguard of personal liberty in the sense that, compared with any other system, it greatly widens the field for the exercise of personal choice.") Every thinking person is to some degree a libertarian, and it is this part of all of us that is bullied or manipulated when liberty is invoked to silence our doubts about the free market. The ploy is to take libertarianism as Orwell meant it and confuse it with libertarianism as Hayek meant it; to take a faith in the individual as an irreducible unit of moral worth, and turn it into a weapon in favor of predation.

Another way to put it—and here lies the legacy of Keynes—is that a free society is an interplay between a more-or-less permanent framework of social commitments, and the oasis of economic liberty that lies within it. The nontrivial question is: What risks (to health, loss of employment, etc.) must be removed from the oasis and placed in the framework (in the form of universal health care, employment insurance, etc.) in order to keep liberty a substantive reality, and not a vacuous formality? When Hayek insists welfare is the road is to serfdom, when Nozick insists that progressive taxation is coercion, they take liberty hostage in order to prevent a reasoned discussion about public goods from ever taking place. "According to them, any intervention of the state in economic life," a prominent conservative economist once observed of the early neoliberals, "would be likely to lead, and even lead inevitably to a completely collectivist Society, Gestapo and gas chamber included." Thus we are hectored into silence, and by the very people who purport to leave us most alone.

Thanks in no small part to that silence, we have passed through the looking glass. Large-scale, speculative risk, undertaken by already grossly overcompensated bankers, is now officially part of the framework, in the form of too-big-to-fail guarantees made, implicitly and explicitly, by the Federal Reserve. Meanwhile, the "libertarian" right moves to take the risks of unemployment, disease, and, yes, accidents of birth, and devolve them entirely onto the responsibility of the individual. It is not just sad; it is repugnant.

Thank heavens it is not seven billion Kim Kardashians!

BTW, all the other cartoons I came across--on this topic of the world population at seven billion--were  Maulthusian.  Pretty much variations of the theme of imbalance between the demand (from the seven billion) and food, or resource, availability.  Like the one below:

Is it because a Malthusian framework appeals to us a lot more than otherwise?  Are humans somehow wired to be pessimistic that way?  Is it because since the proto-human times we have been worried about our individual and collective abilities to survive?

It is an unfortunate irony that not a single cartoon pointed out that if we should be worried about the resource issue, it is not the actual number of people that drives consumption.  Consumption--and overconsumption--comes from affluence.  If only a cartoonist had transformed into an image the following words:

the populations that are rising fastest contribute very little to climate change. The poorest half of the world produces 7% of carbon emissions. The richest 7% produces half the carbon.

Higher education is leading us astray

Taking off on Voltaire's comment on the Holy Roman Empire, I wrote in an opinion piece, which was published a while ago, that there was no"higher" nor "education" in contemporary higher education.

Especially, once we muddied the waters by misrepresenting education as the ticket to jobs, instead of education simply as a pursuit of knowledge with jobs as a wonderful byproduct, well, we have quickly slid down to an incorrect belief that everybody needs to go to college and, worse, that those who choose the trades over college are somehow inferior humans.

With the net result that we are wasting precious time and money, and the ones who will be really screwed by this are the students themselves, who have to pay for the mistakes--individually and as a society.

College is not necessary for most people. It never was. In fact, the preoccupation with college has left America bereft of its former ability to create wealth.
An unhealthy cultural myth has flourished that says everyone must go to college and get an advanced degree, even if it’s something for which there is virtually zero market demand. Meanwhile, below-market interest rates and government-backed loans have lured a couple generations of Americans down the road to higher education.
Further, the kind of education colleges provide — indeed, all of American schooling from kindergarten onward — doesn’t produce innovators, entrepreneurs and job creators.

Oh well ...

If you worried that the excerpt was from a Wall-Street-type guy, how about the following from an academic:

I believe one now has to wonder if going to college is a sensible decision. Such a suggestion would have been unthinkable as recently as five years ago, perhaps, but the combination of two factors—soaring tuition costs and what seems to be a permanently stagnant economy (or at the very least, yet another jobless recovery from a recession), have made me seriously consider whether going to college is now a good choice.
...
So here’s my somewhat obvious question: Is it worthwhile for high-school graduates to go to college right now? My provisional answer, and I’d really like to be persuaded otherwise is “no.” The Republican Party and President Obama are clearly, as we’ve learned in the last weeks, at loggerheads over student-loan reform, so it’s unlikely to happen. Obama argues that students are being crushed by education-related debt; Republicans argue that tightening student-loan regulations and making it easier (and ultimately less punitive) for students to borrow will only serve as an incentive for colleges to increase tuition even more. Both positions are supportable, but as for high-school graduates right now, I think college is a bad bet. The exceptions:  highly practical occupation-related fields and quick and cheap two-year credentials, or, of course, independently wealthy parents or some other guaranteed lifetime-income stream. Otherwise, to start your life with a massive amount of debt (on which one cannot default) and a good chance that you won’t find a full-time job, let alone a secure one with career potential, just doesn’t make sense.

At the end of the day, higher education merely comes across as a giant money-sucking industry--never satisfied with any amount of money spent on it.  After all, the Taj Mahal costs money, right? :(

On the "student athlete" and my love for the New Yorker

First, this excerpt:

Another course that I didn't like, but somehow managed to pass, was economics. I went to that class straight from the botany class, which didn't help me any in understanding either subject. I used to get them mixed up. But not as mixed up as another student in my economics class who came there direct from a physics laboratory. He was a tackle on the football ball team, named Bolenciecwz. At that time Ohio State University had one of the best football teams in the country, and Bolenciecwz was one of its outstanding stars. In order to be eligible to play it was necessary for him to keep up in his studies, a very difficult matter, for while he was not dumber than an ox he was not any smarter. Most of his professors were lenient and helped him along.

Sounds contemporaneous, right? 

You will be surprised then that this is from James Thurber's hilarious tales from his university days, almost a hundred years ago!

We read this Thurber piece back in high school in India.  Yes, back in India!

I am sure the nuances of American higher education and football were lost on us.  But, I bet we could all relate to his experience in the botany lab!  I was (and continue to be) awful with hand-drawing and, well, I "outsourced" to my good friend the drawings we were required to do for the biology lab work.  Somehow I didn't think it was unethical at that time, and now as a faculty I worry about my students outsourcing their work :)

As I look back, I can easily understand now why I am such a fan of the New Yorker magazine--the Thurber's kind of intelligent humor and cartoons continue on through the years. 

And you probably thought, from the title of this post, that it would be a critique of athletics and academics :)

The White House of Horrors

Pretty good, from the NY Times :)

"Green jobs" and Oregon. Intelligent investment, or subpar subsidy?

If only policy-making involved cut and dried kind of binary options, right? But, they are not, and that is only the beginning of the problem! 

Here in Oregon, there is always a dream of "green jobs."  The latest is SoloPower that is proceeding with its plans to build a solar panel manufacturing plant in Portland, thanks to the federal government guaranteeing the loan.  Yes, in the post-Solyndra world, this federal backing is generating a lot of controversy.

But, that controversy is not the reason for this blog post. 

The larger question is whether a federal or state government ought to have any such industrial policies to pick winners and invest in them. 

If private investment is not available in plenty, might there be a reason or two for that?  After all, isn't the market notorious for backing risky investments? Remember Enron, where private investments went down the drain?  Or, how about Google, where private investments have delivered a gazillion dollars as returns? 

Anyway, the industrial policy to favor "green jobs" gains momentum.  Along the lines of what one finds in this op-ed in the Oregonian:

The good news is that Oregon is well-positioned to capitalize on the latest trends in sustainable innovation thanks to its wealth of natural resources, close proximity to Pacific Rim markets, and strong history of acting as an environmental pioneer.

The bad news is that you're already behind due to growing global competition along with the politics in Washington, D.C. failing to provide adequate momentum and leadership. The current U.S. mindset remains mired in now passé second industrial revolution thinking based on fossil fuels, coal, natural gas and nuclear power.

In contrast, the green economic revolution -- and its adopters in the EU and Asia -- deploys renewable energy, new smart technology, and incorporates natural resources like water and land through sustainable policies and business practices. 

Thus, one might conclude it is a win-win for the economy and the environment. 

But, if it is really a win-win-win ... then wouldn't the market forces rush in to realize the profits?  Is the absence of a market rush indicative of how much there is no profit to be made, without taxpayer subsidy?

Why might there not be the big profit?  Megan McArdle explains:

Even if we succeeded in creating, via subsidy, a vibrant domestic solar panel manufacturing industry, there's no reason to think it would stay here . . . unless you're planning to continue the subsidies forever, which is like trying to get rich by paying yourself to mow the lawn.

This is why it's so stupid to focus on "green jobs".  The reason to promote green energy is to mitigate global warming, lessen economic dependence on some very volatile and unstable parts of the world, and build enough scale and demand that you maybe someday usher in an era of power that's "too cheap to meter", as they used to promise about nuclear.  I understand why it makes sense politically for Democrats, but it's also dangerous, because if you can't produce the jobs, a lot of your support for the "green" evaporates, a long with a lot of green money. 

 Where does China come into this?  McArdle channels Matt Yglesias:

What's at issue here, basically, is that China is trying to give us a bunch of free solar panels. It's quite true that insofar as we've been organizing economic activity around the (reasonable) assumption that China won't give us a bunch of free solar panels, that getting the free panels will cause some dislocations. But it seems implausible that the best possible way of dealing with the situation is to refuse to accept the panels. That (poor) China has chosen to boost domestic employment by subsidizing consumption in (rich) America is slightly bizarre, but we may as well try to enjoy it while it lasts.

See, a simple issue of green jobs is not as straightforward as one might wish, which is why policy-making is awfully difficult.  I am way suspicious of people--especially politicians and academics--who pretend or, worse, believe, that there is a right way and a wrong way and that is it.

Poverty in America: Eat our heart out, Bangladesh!

I am not sure, however, what the bottom line is that Trudeau wants to get across to readers.  Is he pointing out the fact that we have poverty?  Or that our poor are better off than the poor in Bangladesh?  Or that ... oh well!

In any case, if you prefer a few words to compare the poor in the US versus the poor elsewhere, then let me quote from a previous post:

The typical person in the top 5 percent of the Indian population, for example, makes the same as or less than the typical person in the bottom 5 percent of the American population. That’s right: America’s poorest are, on average, richer than India’s richest — extravagant Mumbai mansions notwithstanding.

BTW, I thought Bangladesh was no longer the poster child for poverty, and that it was Somalia or Ethiopia :(