Which is more damaging: Hurricane, or typhoon, or cyclone?

It is not the meteorology in which I am interested.

All these are natural events.  And, yes, human activities warming up the world have added power to them.

But, a natural event by itself is merely a natural event.  It is the equivalent of the old philosophical question on whether a tree falling in a forest makes a sound if there is nobody to hear it.  These natural events become "disasters" and "catastrophes" only because they affect us humans.

So, in such a framework, which is the more damaging event?

Consider one of those tropical storms making landfall where no humans live.  It will, of course, uproot trees and flood the rivers.  Is there any damage?

Now, consider one of those tropical storms making landfall in one of the sparsely populated islands in the Philippines.  And then imagine if a storm goes through the Bangladeshi coast.  The number of humans who will be affected will be vastly different, right?

Does it matter that the average Bangladeshi is poorer than the typical Filipino?

Now consider a hurricane hitting the southeastern coast of the US.  Does the "disaster" become costlier because the typical American and the property are way more "expensive"?

One doesn't even need to look beyond Wikipedia for this:

The costs of disasters vary considerably depending on a range of factors, such as the geographical location where they occur. When a disaster occurs in a densely populated area in a wealthy country, the financial damage might be huge, but when a comparable disaster occurs in a densely populated area in a poorer country, the actual financial damage might be relatively small, in part due to a lack of insurance. For example, the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, with a death toll of over 230,000 people, cost a 'mere' $15 billion,^[1] whereas in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, in which 11 people died, the damages were six-fold.

This is an issue that I have struggling with ever since my graduate school days: The "cost" of life varies.  It boggles my mind.  In that Wiki example, a quarter million people perished, but the "cost" of the disaster was low because it all happened in the emerging economies.

It is such economic logic that led Larry Summers, back when he was the World Bank's chief economist, to write that controversial memo, from which he later back-pedaled saying it was a thought experiment and was sarcastic.  That memo joked about the low earnings in emerging economies leading to the "cost" of pollution being lower there and, therefore, polluting industries should migrate to those poorer countries.  In reality, isn't that how the world has operated over the past three decades?

Rich people's lives and property are valued more than poor people's lives are.  As long as this framework does not change, the "costliest" natural disasters will happen only in rich countries.

Therefore, cyclones are the "cheapest" of those storms!

Such is life.

A skeleton without flesh

Consider this statement:

Global health programs can increase life expectancy or decrease child mortality, but ultimately, people want a higher standard of living.

Re-read that.

And now think about that age old wisdom in "health is wealth."

The guy who flatly declared that it is all about economics? Stephen Moore, who was trump's economic policy adviser during the campaign.  He  wants to gut foreign aid to nothing.  As a nutcase Republican, Moore had the formula to prescribe for development:

All these countries have to do is cut taxes, provide private property rights and get involved in global markets  

Yep, cut taxes, provide property rights, engage in international trade, and within a generation even the Central African Republic can become a Singapore!

What a piece of shithead!

I could never understand the right-of-center's worship of economic growth.  Thus, their endless worship of the economic "successes" like China, for instance.

trump now presiding over such a worship means that we in the US too are doing everything to behave like how China does.  trump's people are hell bent on removing regulations that give priority for the natural environment or labor over economics.  Bizarre and awful.

In this essay about capitalism, the author quotes the profound political thinker Karl Polanyi:

fascism strips democratic politics away from human society so that “only economic life remains,” a skeleton without flesh.

Protecting the flesh, and keeping it healthy, means discussing the very idea that the likes of Stephen Moore, paul ryan, and the way right-of-center maniacs hate: The safety net.

we’d be better off with redistributive programs that are universal—parental leave, national health care—rather than targeted. Benefits available to everyone help people without making them feel like charity cases. Kuttner reports great things from Scandinavia, where governments support workers directly—through wage subsidies, retraining sabbaticals, and temporary public jobs—rather than by constraining employers’ power to fire people. “We won’t protect jobs,” Sweden’s labor minister recently told the Times. “But we will protect workers.” Income inequality in Scandinavia is lower than here, and a larger proportion of citizens work. Maybe a government can insure higher pay for its workers by treating them as if they were, in and of themselves, valuable. True, Denmark’s spending on its labor policies has at times risen to as high as 4.5 per cent of its G.D.P., more than the share America spends on defense, and studies show that diverse countries such as ours find it harder to muster social altruism than more racially and culturally homogenous ones do. Nonetheless, programs like Social Security and Medicare, instituted when a communitarian ethic was still strong in American politics, remain popular. Why not try for more?

Unfortunately, the maniacs are dead set against this.  They would rather govern with a fascist in the Oval office, as long as they can carry out their political agenda.  And they actively sell such a "development" model across the world too! :(

We don't know shit!

When people ask me what economic geography is about, one of the examples I give them is what I refer to as a big-picture question.  And that is: Why are some countries rich and some poor?

People always get excited about this example.  Their response is typically along the lines of "wow, I had no idea that geography includes such topics.  I would love to take your classes."

What I don't tell them is this: Don't ask me for the answer on why some countries are rich and some are poor because, well, nobody knows!

We can fairly easily explain why a country is poor.  That is not what I mean.  But, how to place a country on a path of sustained economic and social growth?  This continues to be a mystery, as it was to me when I began graduate school more than three decades ago.

The Economist addresses this metaphorical elephant in the room:

Economists have precious few hard facts about growth. They know that sustained growth in GDP per person only started in the 18th century. They know that countries can become rich only by growing steadily over long periods. They know that in some fundamental way growth is about using new technologies to become more productive and to uncover new ideas. Beyond that, almost everything is contested.

That's what I don't tell people when they ask me about economic geography.  We don't know shit!

But, this is too important a question for us to ignore. The fact that we don't know shit does not mean that we give up.  Why?

A clearer understanding of how growth happens, and why growth-boosting institutions sometimes wither or fail to take root, could raise the living standards of billions of people. The economics of growth should therefore be central to the discipline, even though the questions it poses are objectively hard, and the answers rest more in history and politics than in elegant mathematics.

Note that dig about "elegant mathematics"?  One of the reasons that I chose to go far away from from the economics folks is because of their worship of the math and statistical models, which really don't give any credible answer.  Yet, that is how the academics play their game.

The Economist wraps it up with a valuable advice:

Until they can give better answers in this area, economists should speak with greater humility about how this structural reform or that tax change might affect long-term growth. They have not earned the right to confidence.

Like I said, we need to admit that we don't know shit.

But then, Que sais-je?!

Thank you for smoking!

Nope, this is not about the cigarette industry.

It is about people who smoke without actually smoking.  Yep, without lighting up a cigarette, people smoke about two packs every single day.  Adults, children. Everybody.

On Tuesday, levels of the most dangerous air particles, called PM 2.5, reached more than 700 micrograms per cubic meter in parts of the city, according to data from the United States Embassy. Experts say that prolonged exposure to such high concentrations of PM 2.5 is equivalent to smoking more than two packs of cigarettes a day.

The smog in Delhi is so intense that breathing that air throughout the day is the equivalent of smoking more than two packs of cigarettes!

While in many contexts I metaphorically write about puking, kids and adults are literally throwing up because of this atrocious conditions:

Manish Sisodia, the deputy chief minister of Delhi State, said he was driving to a meeting Wednesday morning when he passed a school bus and saw two children throwing up out of the window. “That was shocking for me,” he said. “I immediately told my officers to pass the order to close all the schools.”

Schools closed for a week.  But, what are the kids going to do?  Their homes don't filter out all the crap.  Further, they will end up playing outside.

The situation prompted the state’s chief minister, Arvind Kejriwal, to say on Twitter: “Delhi has become a gas chamber. Every year this happens during this part of year."

A gas chamber!

Pollution kills. It kills way more than the notorious tobacco industry can ever kill.  “Pollution has not received nearly as much attention as climate change, or Aids or malaria – it is the most underrated health problem in the world."

Pollution kills at least nine million people and costs trillions of dollars every year, according to the most comprehensive global analysis to date, which warns the crisis “threatens the continuing survival of human societies”.
...
The vast majority of the pollution deaths occur in poorer nations and in some, such as India, Chad and Madagascar, pollution causes a quarter of all deaths. The international researchers said this burden is a hugely expensive drag on developing economies. 

People, especially those in India, need to ask themselves whether such a "development" of a country is worth all the physical and emotional toll.

Other people's problems are so easy to solve!

As I worked through the undergraduate program that I knew would not define my career, I could not understand how we humans could invent airplanes and computers and more but could not get toilets and drinking water to the hundreds of millions in India.  There had to be a better way, I was confident.

I went to graduate school.  I walked about the VKC library.  And then the stacks at Doheny.  I went to classes.  I talked with people from different countries. I read academic journals and magazines that I never knew existed.  Later that summer I went to Venezuela as a part of a student research group.

Within a year of coming to America, I understood that we humans are indeed very good at inventing airplanes and computers and more, but we have not been able to provide toilets and drinking water not only to the hundreds of millions in India but also to the hundreds of millions all over the world.  The problems here on earth were way too complex.

Even as my delusions were getting treated by books and articles and real world experiences, I applied for a prestigious professional opportunity at the Mecca of development thinking--the World Bank.  After surviving successive rounds of elimination, I flew across the country on a cold February week for the interview.  I did not even have to wait for the official notification that came a few days later that I did not make it.  Yet, I was not disappointed but was relieved.  I felt like I had dodged a bullet.  I suffered no more illusions that one man or one agency could do it.  Development had to come from within.

Now, older and wiser, and on the other side from the students, I look at the twenty-year olds who seem so confident that they can change the world for the better.  It must be seductive, intoxicating, to think and believe that they can make it happen in the far corners of the world.

In an essay with an arresting title--"The Reductive Seduction of Other People’s Problems"--the author notes:

There is a whole “industry” set up to nurture these desires and delusions — most notably, the 1.5 million nonprofit organizations registered in the U.S., many of them focused on helping people abroad. In other words, the young American ego doesn’t appear in a vacuum. Its hubris is encouraged through job and internship opportunities, conferences galore, and cultural propaganda — encompassed so fully in the patronizing, dangerously simple phrase “save the world.”

Indeed.  It is an industry out there.

The author notes two important problems with this "reductive seduction":

First, it’s dangerous for the people whose problems you’ve mistakenly diagnosed as easily solvable. There is real fallout when well-intentioned people attempt to solve problems without acknowledging the underlying complexity.
Second, the reductive seduction of other people’s problems is dangerous for the people whose problems you’ve avoided. While thousands of the country’s best and brightest flock to far-flung places to ease unfamiliar suffering and tackle foreign dysfunction, we’ve got plenty of domestic need.

An investment banker quitting a Wall Street job in order to "solve" a problem in Kenya, conveniently overlooks the problems right in Manhattan where, perhaps, the problem can really be "solved."

The author ends the essay with this suggestion:

Resist the reductive seduction of other people’s problems and, instead, fall in love with the longer-term prospect of staying home and facing systemic complexity head on. Or go if you must, but stay long enough, listen hard enough so that “other people” become real people. But, be warned, they may not seem so easy to “save.”

The complexity is far more than what NASA had to deal with in sending men to the moon and bringing them back.  Which is why toilets and drinking water continue to be a problem for hundreds of millions in India and elsewhere, even thirty years after I graduated from the engineering college.

The only good thing is that I no longer suffer from delusions.

Are you afraid of ... nothing to do? Learn to enjoy it, instead!

I never liked engineering, in which I earned my undergrad degree--I had a compelling desire to understand poverty and development and how I could contribute to making the world a better place.  And, thus, I was off to graduate schooling in the US, to focus on topics that I wanted to understand.

It was humbling to realize how complex the issues were.  There was no case of any Occam's Razor solution to anything.  Add to all that a more fundamental question of "what for?"

A standard joke laid all these out.  A World Bank consultant (my adviser was one of them, yes) goes to Bangladesh to suggest strategies, and goes to a village where he finds a twenty-something able-bodied man doing nothing but lying under a tree by the water.

"Why don't you work?" the expert asks him.

"I am happy with this.  Why should I work?"

"You can start your own business and earn money."

"Ok, let us say I do that.  What will I do with that money?"

"You can send your children to good schools and college, and they will help expand your business."

"Ok, say I did that.  Then what?"

"You can earn and save a lot of money."

"But, what will I do with the money?"

"You can retire and spend your time simply watching the day go by."

"But, that is exactly what I am doing now" says the villager.

Of course, it is more than a joke.  It is a whole bunch of existential questions.  Why do we do what we do?  What is it that we want?  What is happiness?  Are poor people happy?  Is it ok not to do anything?

In the modern world, we have made a culture of doing something. In fact, we have even created a world of our own of doing more than one thing at one time and we prize that multitasking (I am miserable even at one task a time!)

But, why not do nothing?  Why not get bored?

Yes, this is a topic that fascinates me.  When my neighbors joke that I don't seem to work for a living, I am always tempted to engage them in this kind of a serious discussion.  But, thankfully, I know to recognize small talk when I hear one!  Thus, I blog (previous posts on boredom: here and here) and this post is the latest in the series, triggered by this article:

What if you answered the question “What do you do all day?” with “Nothing”? It isn’t as if that could possibly be true. If you spent all day in bed watching television, or staring at the clouds, you wouldn’t be doing nothing. Children are always being told to stop doing “nothing” when they’re reading or daydreaming. It is lifelong training for the idea that activity is considered essential to mental health, whether it is meaningful or not. Behind the “nothing” is in part a terror of boredom, as if most of the work most people do for most of their lives isn’t boring.

It is bizarre that people would rather report to work that they will openly admit to something they hate, while turning around to make negative comments about people who prefer not to do that and instead do nothing.  They drive to work with bumper stickers along the lines of "I would rather be fishing" when they could, instead, like the Bangladeshi fisherman, spend all day and life by the waters.

We do not like to live like that Bangladeshi because we like to have iPhones, watch ballgames, or travel.  We, therefore, engage in Faustian Bargains of our own: we are willing to put up with wasting away our lives doing things we really do not want to do, and cursing our daily lives, all because we can earn a few dollars in order to spend on things that we think will bring us happiness?

There is an argument to be made against the prototypical life of hard work as the inevitable lot of humanity. In 1974 the Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins published Stone Age Economics. He proposed the idea that individuals in many “simple” societies, far from working themselves to death merely to exist in their nasty, brutish and short lives, were actually members of the “original affluent society”. He suggested that, in those parts of the world where co-operation and social exchange were paramount, once people had done the few days’ hard work of felling a tree and carving out a canoe, there were large amounts of free time to lie about daydreaming, exploring, telling stories: doing “culture” or just skiving. You’d fish in the canoe you’d made, and by preserving and sharing the catch with others, who also shared theirs with you, you could then take a few days off before you needed to get any more. Decent members of those communities did what they needed to do and then when they didn’t need to do it, they stopped.
Only when you worship the idea of accumulation and status based on its perceived wealth-giving properties do you have to work hard all the time. Accumulation was hampering; you had to carry it about with you when you moved from camp to camp, or find ways of storing and securing it if you were sedentary. Without the idea of surplus as a value beyond its use value, when you needed/wanted something you got it, and when you had it, you enjoyed it until it was time to get some more.

What a bizarre existence that we have designed for ourselves!

Leisure, not doing, is so terrifying in our culture that we cut it up into small, manageable chunks throughout our working year in case an excess of it will drive us mad, and leave the greatest amount of it to the very end, in the half-conscious hope that we might be saved from its horrors by an early death.

This weekend, ask yourself this question: what do you really want in life before that death happens?  Surely it is not the latest iPhone, is it?  Your wish is not to watch the latest movie, right?  So, what exactly are you so busily spinning the wheels for?  Sit down for a while. Figure it out. You will reward yourself with a rich rest of your life, even if that only means doing nothing at all.

The exacting price of democracy: China v. India

I have blogged often, like here, about the Chinese/Singapore model for development, versus the Indian approach to it.  

The Economist captures these development models in terms of a few indicators:

China zoomed past India's current level of child mortality rate 33 years ago!  The freedom to express oneself in many ways is perhaps the only difference between these two countries.  It is a significant difference, yes.  But, is that a worthwhile trade-off then?  A tough call ...

Women's Economic Opportunity: Eastern Europe looking good!

From the Economist:

Opportunity is defined as a combination of prevailing labour policies, access to finance, education and training, and legal and social status. One surprising finding: under communism women were encouraged (or expected) to work, and this attitude has persisted in many former communist countries, which continue to provide more opportunities for women.

Don't simply give foreign aid. Give Micronutrients

Bjorn Lomborg writes:

Billions of dollars are given and spent on aid and development by individuals and companies each year. Despite this generosity, we simply do not allocate enough resources to solve all of the world's biggest problems. In a world fraught with competing claims on human solidarity, we have a moral obligation to direct additional resources to where they can achieve the most good. And that is as true of our own small-scale charitable donations as it is of governments' or philanthropists' aid budgets.

So, where will be the largest return on investment?

Micronutrient deficiency is known as "hidden hunger." This is a fitting description, because it is one of the global challenges that we hear relatively little about in the developed world. It draws scant media attention or celebrity firepower, which are often crucial to attracting charitable donations to a cause.

Hey, a road monster ahead .... watch out :)

Ok, it is not a monster.
It is oxygen pipes at a tunnel construction project in India--this NY Times piece talks about how India is raising money to finance development projects like this one:

In the last 10 months, India has raised $3.5 billion selling off pieces of state-run companies, more than such sales brought in during the previous four years. Overburdened with debt, New Delhi desperately needs the cash, in part to finance development projects like roads, schools and hospitals that may help sustain the country’s impressive growth.

The NY Times adds this:

So far, policy makers are just scratching the surface. The government owns 473 companies worth about $500 billion, or 45 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.
Economists say New Delhi could raise several billion dollars simply by reducing its stake to 90 percent in listed companies. And the government has said it plans to list an additional 60 profitable state-owned operations on the country’s stock exchanges.
“It’s a no-brainer,” said Prithvi Haldea, chairman of Prime Database, a research firm based in New Delhi. “It’s a simplistic way of raising capital for the government.”
But Mr. Haldea, like many analysts, is skeptical that New Delhi will go far enough or move fast enough.
Economists’ arguments have taken on added weight because India’s efforts to bolster growth and reduce endemic poverty are running up against daunting fiscal realities. With government debt already at 80 percent of G.D.P., policy makers cannot easily borrow more money without significantly driving up interest rates and making it more difficult for the private sector to borrow.

I grew up at one of the better government-owned project/towns--Neyveli.  It is one of the few profitable enterprises that are state-owned.
BTW, notice that the Indian government debt is at 80 percent of the GDP?  Guess what the US government's debt is as a percentage of the GDP?  You think it is higher or lower?
Ready for the answer?

federal marketable debt held by the public, which we estimate will be 60.7% of GDP at the end of F2010, will jump to 87% of GDP in the next decade - a level not seen since the post-WW II period (1947).

Photo of the day: cellphone at a paddy field

Slowly, as I blogged earlier too, governments are waking up to making use of cellphones in their development strategies; this excerpt and the photo are from The Hindu:

The Union government is trying to evolve a framework for using the mobile platform to improve the access of a large section of the population, especially the poor, to basic financial and banking services. This coincides with the growing realisation, globally, of the need for developing countries to put mobile technology to optimum use to serve the underprivileged.