The Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. The Pope

In a 5-4 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court has temporarily barred New York from enforcing strict attendance limits on places of worship in areas designated coronavirus hot spots.  The case on which it ruled is this: Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, New York v. Andrew M. Cuomo, Governor of New York.

Let's take a religion roll call first:

Roman Catholic Diocese v. Cuomo, who is Catholic

The five justices who ruled in favor of the Diocese:

• Amy Coney Barrett--Catholic
• Brett Kavanaugh--Catholic
• Neil Gorsuch--Episcopelian (raised Catholic)
• Justices Samuel Alito--Catholic
• Clarence Thomas--Catholic

The four justices in the minority:

• John Roberts--Catholic
• Stephen Breyer--Jewish
• Elena Kagan--Jewish
• Sonia Sotomayor--Catholic

How did Cuomo react?

Cuomo described Wednesday's decision as a political statement. In his daily coronavirus briefing Thursday, he said, "Look, I'm a former altar boy, Catholic, Catholic grammar school, Catholic high school, Jesuits at college. So I fully respect religion and if there's a time in life when we need it, the time is now. But we want to make sure we keep people safe at the same time, and that's the balance we're trying to hit, especially in this holiday season."

So, which Catholic would you believe?

Why not check with the infallible Catholic, the Pope himself?

With some exceptions, governments have made great efforts to put the well-being of their people first, acting decisively to protect health and to save lives. The exceptions have been some governments that shrugged off the painful evidence of mounting deaths, with inevitable, grievous consequences. But most governments acted responsibly, imposing strict measures to contain the outbreak.

Yet some groups protested, refusing to keep their distance, marching against travel restrictions — as if measures that governments must impose for the good of their people constitute some kind of political assault on autonomy or personal freedom! Looking to the common good is much more than the sum of what is good for individuals. It means having a regard for all citizens and seeking to respond effectively to the needs of the least fortunate.

Hmmm ... let's remind ourselves what the Supreme Court's majority opinion noted:

The restrictions at issue here, by effectively barring many from attending religious services, strike at the very heart of the First Amendment's guarantee of religious liberty

The Pope, on the other hand, writes:

It is all too easy for some to take an idea — in this case, for example, personal freedom — and turn it into an ideology, creating a prism through which they judge everything.

I understand that a lawmaker who is Catholic doesn't take orders from the Pope on political issues. That was the very issue that JFK faced as the first serious Catholic candidate, and he made the separation of church and state very clear. 

For contrary to common newspaper usage, I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party's candidate for president, who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me.

Whatever issue may come before me as president — on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject — I will make my decision in accordance with these views, in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates.

I am glad that judges who happen to be Catholic don't take marching orders from the Pope.  But, what about the science of public health that guides the political decisions on restrictions on churches during Covid?  Why is Chief Justice Roberts' view not the majority opinion when he writes: "Only that our Constitution principally entrusts the safety and health of the people to the politically accountable officials of the states to guard and protect."

I suppose the Pope is not infallible even to justices who happen to be Catholic.

Going stag

Emma Watson created some brouhaha by declaring herself to be self-partnered.  The rest of us refer to that existence as being single.  Maybe she was serious about that usage, or perhaps she was joking.  But, a brouhaha resulted.  And a few commentaries on her statement, like this one, in whcih the author writes:

The problem with declaring yourself self-partnered is that you’re ceding the argument, agreeing with the precept that some kind of monogamous partnership is a necessary component to a fulfilling life. Self-partnered also makes the same mistake that most depictions of romantic partnership do—assuming that one person can be all things for another. Even a person in a perfect romantic relationship still needs intimate platonic relationships. Self-partnering turns us even more into islands, suggesting that with the right mindset we can all be self-sufficient. A woman’s singleness is not a situation to be corrected, transcended, or rebranded. Be single, Emma, and be proud.

The language issues aside, it is high time that we the people reconsidered privileging the married people through the laws that we have created and the monetary benefits that we bestow on them.  "single people still don’t have access to the legal benefits and protections the government grants to those who get married."  Like what, you ask?

In the US, there are more than 1,100 laws benefiting married couples, and that’s just at the federal level; many states offer perks and protections as well.
Spouses in the US can pass on Medicare, as well as Social Security, disability, veterans and military benefits. They can get health insurance through a spouse’s employer; receive discounted rates for homeowners’, auto and other types of insurance; make medical decisions for each other as well as funeral arrangements; and take family leave to care for an ill spouse, or bereavement leave if a spouse dies.

Now, those are not bad things.  In fact, they are fantastic.  But, why privilege the spouse?  After all, it is not as if single people are mere isolated beings who dropped on earth from outer space, right?  If you prick them, do they not bleed like us?

After all, singles are rarely all alone. They have parents, siblings and other relatives, they have close friends and, often, lovers. Why should they be denied the right to pass on their Social Security benefits to them when they die, instead of having their money absorbed back into the system? Why should they be denied paid time off work to care for them?

Aha, you say now, eh!

I have never understood why a government should subsidize family and marriage.  Especially when we are no longer a "traditional" world in which the man works and the woman stays home barefoot and pregnant.

The law professor Martha Albertson Fineman argues in her book The Autonomy Myth (2004) that the government should stop privileging married couples, and offer the same perks and protections to anyone in a caregiving role. The law professor Vivian E Hamilton makes a similar argument in her paper ‘Mistaking Marriage for Social Policy’ (2004).

Notice that both those authors who are quoted are women?  It is not any accident.  After all, the current framework benefits the man as the primary income earner in a traditional family and they aren't going to be complaining.

Some day, we will wake up to the new reality that has been around us for a while.  But, I know better than to hold my breath for this to happen.

When men come to god's defense

We live in such godawful times of a President tweeting and uttering incoherent rants that we have forgotten how much we used to adore, revere, and quote presidential observations and rhetoric.

Oh, don't worry; this post is not to vent about the horrible human being in the Oval Office nor about his 63 million bootlickers.  Nope. It is about the maniacal goings-on in the old country.

We used to quote Presidents.  Like Abraham Lincoln, who said,  "My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right."  If I were a believer, then that would be my position too--a true believer knows that god doesn't need us mortals to defend her honor.  Instead, it is us mortals who need god to protect us. This simple logic is apparently lost on most fanatical faithful!

And thus the Hindu fanatics--almost always men, across all the religions--continue to fight to keep menstruating girls and women away from a temple where the god is believed to be a bachelor.  I blogged about this issue back in February 2016, when tRump was looming as a threat, and when even those who hated him but later turned around and voted for him used to comment at this blog.

I wrote there that in India, the government oversees the functioning of temples.  As a result, of course, the judicial arm of the government has a say in whether menstruating women should be barred from entering temples.  Such is the theatre of the absurd!

That was in 2016 as the lawsuit was filed.  Two years later came the verdict: "In 2018, while lifting the ban on women's entry into the shrine, the Supreme Court had said that everyone had the right to practice religion and that the ban was a form of "untouchability"."

Last December in India, protests and counter-protests I saw and read about.  Intellectuals and leaders wrote commentaries.  Women were turned away from the temple.  The fight continues:

India's Supreme Court said Thursday it will set law on women’s entry into temples and mosques after being asked to review its decision lifting a ban on some women entering the Sabarimala temple in Kerala state.

Back to square one:

A temple official welcomed the ruling and appealed to women to stay away.
Women trying to enter the temple after the verdict last year were attacked by mobs blocking the way.
Many checked vehicles heading towards the temple to see if any women of a "menstruating age" - deemed to be those aged between 10 and 50 years - were trying to enter.

It is a disgrace that quite a few men are so obsessed with the reproductive system of women.  And these men so firmly believe that they are doing god's work?

The lifestyles of the rich and the famous

In my early days of writing newspaper commentaries, rejections were in plenty.  One of the pieces that never was published was about the Rhodes Scholarship.

Yep, about some obscure scholarship that perhaps even 99% of regular newspaper readers don't know about.  It certainly failed the "will it play in Peoria?" test that editors often employ.

But, to me this was, and continues to be, an important issue that we don't talk about much.  The commentary that I wrote was not merely about the scholarship.  But, the Rhodes Scholarship was the launching point for me to question the value of ill-gotten gains.

Cecil Rhodes did not make his fortunes in any laudable manner.  And, even more worryingly, the guy was a staunch imperialist and a racist, who believed that his people were the greatest race on earth.  His dream was to bring the entire world under British rule.  World domination by his people was his ultimate goal, for which he even devoted money that he had made from other people's misfortunes.

Yet, there is Rhodes Scholarship.  And we celebrate Rhodes Scholars?

I used that launching pad in order to question the value of philanthropy.  (Much later, and in a different context, I wrote this commentary about--pecunia non olet--the stink of money.)

Anand Giridharadas has written a bestseller on this topic, and the recent news reports add more evidence for him:

We have crossed the point beyond which anyone in philanthropy can wiggle out of this problem by talking about some good examples or invoking Bill Gates. Yes. Yes. Yes. There is much good being done. But your tool has become the implement of choice for scoundrels. Face it.

— Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) September 10, 2019

I continue to worry about philanthropy.  Not only because of how the "philanthropists" made their fortunes but for a reason beyond that.  In a democracy, philanthropy tends to terribly undercut the ability of government to address the public interest.  As this review notes, Robert Reich--a Rhodes Scholar himself!--argues in his book that in a democracy, "philanthropy amplifies the power of the few at the expense of the many."

The rich avoid paying taxes, which makes it difficult for government to address real public policy issues like homelessness.  And meanwhile, the rich get tax deductions for their "philanthropy" that is used to pursue their favorite agendas.

The income tax deduction for charitable donations, Reich argues, is effectively a state subsidy for philanthropy. And since tax rates increase progressively on the basis of income, the rich are, in effect, being paid by the government to exert power by giving their money away.

To use Shakespeare's words, "So are they all, all honourable men."

One consumer at a time is the wrong approach

Welcome to today's episode of "If only people listened to me!"

For years, I have been ranting writing and saying that mantras like "recycle" or "become a vegetarian" is nothing but individuals feeling good about how they are helping the natural environment, but is really nothing more than, well, like peeing on oneself on a cold night to feel warm for a couple of seconds!

And this rant is from a nature-loving (mostly) vegetarian who is conscientious about his trash and recycling.

The rant against feel-goodism is because it means that "we have accepted individual responsibility for a problem we have little control over."  We consumers have been brainwashed into believing that we created these problems and that we can solve these ourselves, if only we behaved "correctly" in our homes.

Awful bullshit that is.

And that's what this review of  Inconspicious Consumption: The Environmental Impacts You Don’t Know You Have points out about the book's message:

[Tatiana] Schlossberg says, “it is not the fault of the consumer that cashmere is cheap, and it’s not wrong to want nice things or to buy them, sometimes. ... It’s not within your control how some company sources and produces its cashmere, or the size of the herd that they got it from. That should be the corporation’s burden … or governments should make sure they act responsibly.”

Like I said earlier, welcome to today's edition of "If only people listened to me!"

So, does it mean that we individuals cannot do any damn thing?  We merely come up with ideas like Extended Producer Responsibility and circular economy that seemingly go nowhere?

Well, yes, as individuals who recycle and reduce trash while being a vegetarian, we are powerless.  But, get a few of us together and ...

Governments and corporations, of course, don’t do such things automatically — they need citizens to push them. But it doesn’t require every citizen to push in order to make change (since apathy cuts both ways, social scientists estimate that getting 3 or 4 percent of people involved in a movement is often enough to force systemic change, whereas if they acted solely as consumers that same number would have relatively little effect). You can obviously do both, and all of us should try — but fighting for the Green New Deal makes more mathematical sense than trying to take on the planet one commodity at a time.

You want an example?  I can give you plenty from my own blog.  But then who cares for sriram's rants, right?  Here's from the review:

[Instead] of trying to figure out every single aspect of our lives, a carbon tax would have the effect of informing every one of those decisions, automatically and invisibly. The fuel efficiency standards that the Obama administration put forward and Trump is now gutting would result in stunningly different outcomes. And so on.

In a democracy (call it a republic if you are one of those rightwing nutcases!) we collectively deal with these issues via elections and the government.

We aren’t going to solve our problems one consumer at a time. We’re going to need to do it as societies and civilizations, or not at all.

Elections have consequences, as 63 million people reminded us!

BTW, who is the reviewer, you ask?  None other than Bill McKibben.  

Government is for losers. Exactly!

In this post from October 2010, I wrote about a golden rule from India: the "dharma" of a rich person is to create a lot of wealth, and to donate wealth to charity.

The old Indian wisdom recognized that creating wealth is not only ok, but is the duty for some.  But, what comes after that wealth .... something like the "noblesse oblige" in the Western contexts.  Here is one:

संपदो जलतरंगविलोल
   यौवनं त्रिचतुराणि दिनानि ।
शारदाभ्रपरिपेलवमायुः
   किं धनैः परहितानि कुरुध्वम् ॥

- सुभाषितसुधानिधि

Wealth is as temporary as a wave on still water. Youth is just a matter of few years. Our life it self is as uncertain as a cloud of Sharat month (where clouds could get formed and dispersed in a matter of minutes. No rain.) What is the use of all the wealth that you accumulate? Spend them in a way that is helpful to others.

That golden rule is from way back in time, well before the modern concept of countries and governments.  In those bad old days, with wealth and power concentrated with a few, while the overwhelming majority toiled away, charity helped, and helped a lot.  Perhaps charity also helped in the small geographic areas within which the rich and powerful lived.

Now, the rich and the powerful have international reach.  But, our collective problems are way beyond the neighborhood.  Take climate change, for instance.  No amount of philanthropy can tackle that kind of a challenge. Or public health in these times when infectious diseases can easily spread not merely within a country but also across countries.

Philanthropy is no match against the machinery of the government.  However, for the government to address these challenging collective issues, well, the rich and the powerful need to pay up.  And for them to pay their share Republicans need to first acknowledge that our collective challenges, like climate change, are for real and are not some elaborate hoaxes!

If they acknowledged these collective challenges, then they would automatically realize that individuals and charities cannot fight carbon, for instance, and that a well-funded government will be needed for such huge campaigns.

For now, the head in the sand racist party can only keep chanting "tax cuts".

Writing in the NY Times, gazillionaire Eli Broad argues:

I’ve come to realize that no amount of philanthropic commitment will compensate for the deep inequities preventing most Americans — the factory workers and farmers, entrepreneurs and electricians, teachers, nurses and small-business owners — from the basic prosperity we call the American dream.

He continues:

I invite fellow members of the 1 percent to join me in demanding that they engage in a robust discussion of how we can strengthen a post-Trump America by reforming our tax code.

But, the racist party and their Dear Leader that 63 million voted for, which loves to associate with the far-right, will perhaps merely associate Broad, who is Jewish, with their favorite target, who is also a big time philanthropist--George Soros.

Let's see what happens in November 2020.

"When someone tells you who they are, believe them"

One of the many movie lines (almost) that Ronald Reagan used was the one about the most terrifying words in the English language: "'I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

His party loyalists cheered him.

The reality is far from that.  In fact, it is closer to what Maya Angelou said: "When someone tells you who they are, believe them."  Almost always, except when the chief executive is from the GOP, the government is here to help.  Under the GOP Presidents, it seems true that those are some terrifying words.

Back when tRump was merely one of the contenders in the GOP primary, when he launched his blitzkrieg, his supporters cheered him on and some even defended him by saying that the media and his critics were taking tRump literally but never seriously.

But, those of us who adopted the Angelou guideline, took him literally and seriously.  How could we not?  He was so obvious. So transparent in what he said and did.

"When someone tells you who they are, believe them."

And here we are, when the President and his government machinery cruelly turns away the asylum seeking desperate people!

Caption at the source:

A protester holds a sign during a demonstration outside of the James R. Browning United States Courthouse on June 11th, 2019, in San Francisco, California. Dozens of activists staged a demonstration in support of restoring protections for asylum seekers.

tRump proves that reagan was right about the terrifying words in the English language.

The good thing is that the majority of my fellow citizens will not play his cruel games.  We may not be Jesus-loving Christians, but we practice a lot more of Jesus's preaching than they do when they support tRump.

A majority of my fellow Americans are like the jurors in the recently concluded trial in Arizona, where Scott Warren was accused as being a danger to the country all because he is a humanitarian. A Good Samaritan.  He provided water and food to migrants in the harsh desert.  That was his crime.

In the closing argument, the US Attorney--from the government to help us--said this:

“He gave them food, he gave them water, he gave them a place to stay...He did a bad thing.” -- Anna Wright, @USAO_AZ in her closing argument that #ScottWarren should be convicted. pic.twitter.com/jm67RYlzX1

— No More Deaths (@NoMoreDeaths) June 7, 2019

He did a bad thing, for which the government wanted to send him to prison for 20 years!

The jury didn't buy that argument.  It ended in a mistrial.

For now, at least, tRump and his terrifying government have been held under check.  My hope is that the reign of terror will end soon.  We will return to the days of a helpful government.

Caveat Emptor

I had some quick learning to do when I transitioned from electrical engineering to graduate studies in topics about which I was fascinated but were all brand new.  Every day I was encountering new phrases that might have been elementary to some but were the metaphorical Greek and Latin to me.  And sometimes they were literally in the Latin.

This was also in the prehistoric days before Google. Before the internet as we understand it today.  Which meant that any time I ran into new phrases, it was darn difficult to figure out what the hell it meant. Sometimes, despite my ultra-self-consciousness and introvertedness, I managed to get myself to faculty's offices and ask them to clarify.

One of the phrases that initially stumped me was caveat emptor.  I chanced upon a faculty searching for a book in the library.  Lowdon Wingo.  I had never come across such a name ever.  He was ancient even back then.  (He will one supercentenarian if he were alive now)  I gathered up all my courage and asked him what caveat emptor meant.

Buyer beware!

That, by itself, gave me a lot to think about the market system.

If the buyer is not carefully looking through the product details, then?  So long, sucker!  Uncle Sam doesn't really care about the human buyer, but is always far more keen on the most important person ever--the corporation!

Economic life in the US has not changed all that much over these years.

Across a span of cosmetics, including makeup, toothpaste and shampoo, to items ranging from household cleaners to fruit juice to cheese, hundreds of potentially harmful ingredients banned in the EU are legally allowed in the US. ...
“Generally, the EU has got it right. In the US we have a strong favouritism towards companies and manufacturers, to the extent that public health and the environment is being harmed. The pendulum has swung in an extreme way and it’s really going to take a general awakening by the public.”

Caveat emptor!

Want an example? "In cosmetics alone, the EU has banned or restricted more than 1,300 chemicals while the US has outlawed or curbed just 11."

Why is it so here in the US?

The clout of powerful industry interests, combined with a regulatory system that demands a high level of proof of harm before any action is taken, has led to the American public being routinely exposed to chemicals that have been rubbed out of the lives of people in countries such as the UK, Germany and France.

I don't  understand such a behavior.  Don't American industry leaders and lobbyists have children and grandchildren that they worry about?  Why would they not want to make sure their little ones will have an awesome future?  Why would they want to condemn those innocent kids to caveat emptor?

I know; that was a rhetorical question.  That was answered well in Thank you for smoking, remember?

Oh well ... so, is there any hope?

“I’m hoping for dramatic changes in our politics but there’s little chance of that,” said Bergstein. “The federal government is barely functioning, so consumers have to realize they have the power to become more vocal and demand change. The awareness is still not there, though.”

Caveat voter!

The market speaks. But the deniers can't hear!

One can be in denial forever.  But, eventually, one has to face the truth, and accept it.  Such a day of reckoning for the deniers of climate change, aka tRump's toadies, might arrive sooner than they think.

This reckoning will not happen because they will voluntarily admit to the reality.  Nor will the message be delivered to them by their churches.

Instead, their almighty dollar will beat the crap out of them.

If the coming climate-related business crises will have one positive side effect, it’s that acute financial losses are likely to force policy changes in a way that environmental damage on its own has not. As one commenter on a recent Wall Street Journal article about PG & E. put it: “When capitalists decide the scientists are right, then the free market will adjust accordingly.”

They can complain all they want about science and government and Europeans, but the market will make them see Jesus!

California's PG&E is already suffering from the consequences and "would be filing for bankruptcy protection as a result of costs related to recent wildfires in the state."  It is the mere beginning.  The reality of climate change is also reflected in the real estate industry:

“The market is already reacting,” First Street Executive Director Matthew Eby said. “There’s no longer a conversation of what sea-level rise will do in 2050 or 2100.”

How is it reacting?

Sea-level rise has cost homeowners on the East and Gulf coasts nearly $16 billion in property value as floods and the threat of flooding drive some buyers away, according to a study released this week.
Analysts at the nonprofit First Street Foundation in Brooklyn studied millions of residential home sales in 17 states from Maine to Alabama and found that coastal property values were rising at a slower rate in flood-prone areas than in areas that did not flood.

What is holding the market back from a full-fledged reaction to climate change and, therefore, from delivering a blow to denialism? A "focus by policymakers in Washington on making changes that could actually turn things around."

“People in this field say, ‘We know what the problem is, and we know how to solve the problem,’ ” Usher said. Our politicians, however, “don’t have the willingness to do something. That’s where we are.”

There are a few politicians willing to do something; cue the Green New Deal!

Father, what does lying mean?

The title of the post that ended the series on Jill Lepore's book was this: Lying is as American as apple pie.

Of course, there is nothing exceptional about lying in America.  Everybody lies.  It is universal.  In the modern world, businesses are experts at lying.  How many years has it been since the Bhopal tragedy, for instance, and how truthful has the criminal business been?  Or, how truthful has the Indian government been?

Businesses routinely lie. Which is why we often joke, because there is nothing else that we can really do, that "business ethics" is an oxymoron!  A short piece at Harvard Business Review begins like this:

Many of the corporate scandals in the past several years — think Volkswagen or Wells Fargo — have been cases of wide-scale dishonesty. It’s hard to fathom how lying and deceit permeated these organizations.

Wait a second, aren't lying and deceit important and fundamental values in money-making?!

At least these businesses do not pretend to be moral compasses that point to people the direction to heaven and hell.  Lying, as we have always known, is very much a part of the culture of institutionalized religions too.  As if the Roman Catholic church has not messed up with people's lives enough and then lying about every crime that they have been involved with, the latest--as shocking as it is--continues along the path of lying and deceit that the institution has always done:

[The] Vatican has confirmed, apparently for the first time, that its department overseeing the world’s priests has general guidelines for what to do when clerics break celibacy vows and father children.
“I can confirm that these guidelines exist,” the Vatican spokesman Alessandro Gisotti wrote in response to a query from The New York Times. “It is an internal document.”

Think about this: The Vatican has developed procedures on what to do, what to say, whenever one of its priests end up fathering children.  And these procedures are to ensure that the word does not get out.  Systematic lying and deceit are fundamental values in religion too!

The Vatican even has a specific phrase to refer to the children of priests: "children of the ordained."  And, of course, there is no "official" estimate of the numbers of "children of the ordained."

The children are sometimes the result of affairs involving priests and laywomen or nuns — others of abuse or rape. There are some, exceedingly rare, high-profile cases, but the overwhelming majority remain out of the public eye.

Just awful! 

Keep this, too, in mind when the Pope or any of his underlings chastize the business world for not working for the greater good.  Nor should you ever be fooled by any business that pretends that it never does anything evil.  And, don't get me started about politicians and governments.

Bloody liars they mostly are!

The dumb fucks we are!

One of my go-to technology columnists, Farhad Manjoo, has gotten me worried about the "frightful five" for a while now.  As if I needed more to ad to my near-paranoia!  In one of those columns, Manjoo wrote:

This is the most glaring and underappreciated fact of internet-age capitalism: We are, all of us, in inescapable thrall to one of the handful of American technology companies that now dominate much of the global economy. I speak, of course, of my old friends the Frightful Five: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Alphabet, the parent company of Google.

There are a gazillion posts in this blog where I have expressed my worries about all these companies.  The worries have not ever abated, but get louder and louder and louder and ...

Yet, the public is apparently not worried.  What’s going on here?

Why are people still so unafraid of the world’s richest corporations, even as those corporations collect fine-grained data on almost every aspect of our lives and shape the way we work, communicate, and spend our free time?
One relatively obvious factor may be that the big tech companies make things that people love: iPhones, Gmail, Instagram, and other flagship products have hundreds of millions of loyal users. The warm feelings those devices and services engender may blind people to the industry’s darker undersides of mass surveillance, targeted advertising, and addictiveness.

Those dark sides.

Now add domestic and international politics to all those, and you get a pitch black darkness.  The Darkening Web is the book that is the context for an essay in the NYRB.

The interests that now guide what technologies they produce are not entirely commercial ones. The national security community has exploited the private sector to help develop America’s immense cyber-capabilities. In doing so it has placed an extraordinary array of potential cyber-weapons in the hands of unaccountable private companies.

"unaccountable."

That should worry you, too. A lot.

And keep in mind that there is a lot of mutually beneficial crossover between the unaccountable frightful five and the unaccountable national security interests of the government.

the development in Silicon Valley of a hybrid public/private economy in which the government assists in the creation of new technologies it needs for national security operations by investing in companies that can also commercialize these technologies.
Government agencies have mitigated risk and even helped to create markets for companies whose products, while ostensibly strictly civilian and commercial, satisfy their own needs. The driverless car industry will incorporate, test, and improve technologies devised for missile guidance systems and unmanned drones. Facial recognition software developed by intelligence agencies and the military for surveillance and identity verification (in drone strikes, for example) is now assuming a friendly guise on our iPhones and being tested by millions of users.

In short, the "direction of technological development in the commercial sector, in other words, is influenced by the agenda of government agencies in ways largely unknown to the public."

Zuckerberg, in a well-known incident he now surely regrets, was asked in the early days of Facebook why people would hand over their personal information to him. He responded, “They trust me—dumb fucks.” We’re finally starting to appreciate the depth of the insult to us all. Now we need to figure out how to keep the corporations we have supported with our taxes, data, and undivided attention from treating us like dumb fucks in the future.

The dumb fucks we are!

Public "servants"

My father (and this guy's father, too) was among the many from his generation of public sector employees who missed out on pensions--they were not offered those benefits back then.  Thus, there were a few years when my brother and I regularly sent our parents money in order to help with the cash flow after father's retirement.  True to my parents' honest life, they have maintained a detailed accounting of the total remittances from their sons!

A couple of years ago, when my father came to know that my faculty salary is nowhere near the stratospheric earnings of the young and the old in the IT industry where every other Indian-American is, he insisted that they return my remittances, now that my parents do not have the cash crunch, but I managed to convince him that I am not in any financial hole.

The logic behind public sector pensions was simple: To reward those opting for public service, where the compensation is far less than what comparably talented people could earn in the private sector. For instance, when I was new to the country, a friend took me along when he visited with a cousin of his, who was a worker in an automobile assembly plant in California.  I would never have guessed that the palatial home with shiny cars in the driveway belonged to an auto factory worker who did not have a college degree.  Such were the economic possibilities even a couple of decades ago.

The global economic geography has changed.  And has changed fast.  The well-paying middle class jobs are rapidly vanishing from the American scene.  Well, vanishing from the private sector, that is.  Meanwhile, the public sector unions became stronger and stronger, and successfully increased the compensation levels.  So much so that public sector pensions have now become a nightmare for governments that have to balance their books.

As with many aspects of life, California is a leader in this as well, with its California Public Employees Retirement System, or CalPERS:

The pension fund is more than $139 billion in the red and just reported another awful year of investment returns. The East Bay Times reported last week that CalPERS' retirement debt "averages out to $11,000 for every California household which is relevant because taxpayers, not government workers, must make up the shortfall."

That update from Reason--a libertarian outfit, which has been a part of my daily news feed for years now--notes that "Most state pension funds are deep in debt, but CalPERS is among the worst in the nation."

Public sector pension in Oregon was a big story in our local paper too:

Anemic investment returns in recent years have also contributed to the troubles for the system, which now has an unfunded liability of more than $20 billion. When investment returns don’t meet the system’s assumed 7.5 percent annual rate of return, public employers must make up the difference in their budgets. The need to feed ever-greater amounts into PERS is one factor that forces many local Oregon public agencies to trim services or seek tax increases.

Now, I don't want you to think that we faculty are draining the state coffers:

 Dr. Johnny Delashaw, a former neurosurgeon at Portland’s Oregon Health & Science University, has supplanted former University of Oregon football coach Mike Bellotti as the state’s top public pension recipient.
Delashaw receives an annual benefit of $663,354 a year — $55,279.53 a month — from the Oregon Public Employee Retirement System, the agency’s latest data show. That’s 24 percent higher than Bellotti’s annual benefit of $536,995.
Bellotti had been Oregon’s top PERS beneficiary since the retirement agency first started releasing data in late 2011

Yep, a football coach used to be most highly paid retiree!  Says a lot about what people really, really, want, right?

Meanwhile, back in India, the unions learnt their lessons from the unions here, but the government did not learn from the experiences here--public sector pension schemes have skyrocketed in India.  My father, too, has a tough time understanding how such things are possible.

Full disclosures: In California and in Oregon, my jobs included pension schemes.  But, it was never the money that drew me to the teaching profession in the first place; if money were important to me, I would never have quit engineering! And, oh, I have never been a member of a union.

Are you not entertained?

Re-arranging my belongings at home provided me with an opportunity to re-read some of my newspaper commentaries from years past.  I am pretty darn impressed with myself, I tell ya.  For one, even in my earliest commentaries, it is clear that I quickly learnt how to write, after a disastrous start in graduate school.  More importantly, I am pleased with myself for the consistency with which I have argued many of my positions.

In one of those commentaries, I argued that the local government should not be in the entertainment business.  I wrote this in the context of Bakersfield's plan to spend gazillions on an arena.  My point was that we do not have governments in order to entertain us, and that sports and arenas should be left to the market.  Of course, given how much people love, love being entertained--no wonder Trump made it to the top with his reality entertainment--and given how much I am always on the losing side, well, ...

This is not a new position since graduate school.  I was even more opposed to governments investing in entertainment back when I was a commie sympathizer.  I was an undergraduate student when India hosted the Asian Games.  Television was a new thing in our lives at that time; yet, I decided that I would boycott it.  I did not watch even one minute of those games on TV.  I could not, and still cannot, understand why the government would waste all that money on entertainment when there were far more urgent human problems everywhere in India.  The only difference is that back then I did not articulate an argument that entertainment should come out of private spending.

Next month, it will be the mother of all sports entertainment--the Olympics.  As I have done with the past events, I will boycott this too.

Those with money, who want to be entertained, have somehow managed to convince those without any money--who also like to be entertained--that investing gazillions of public money on all things sports is an economic investment with huge returns.  One awesome bullshit that happens over and over again only because the unthinking people like to be entertained 24x7!

Any unbiased observer will tell you the same thing: You may as well dig huge holes, fill them with all the money you have, and pour concrete over them!

Economists are notorious for being unable to agree on anything. So it's striking that on the finances of the Olympics, they almost all agree.
"Investing in the Olympics is not worth the investment," says Andy Zimbalist of Smith College.
"You build all these facilities that are perfect for the Olympics, that are not really as desirable once the circus leaves town," says Allen Sanderson of the University of Chicago.
"You end up with a very indebted city or host nation long after the confetti is cleaned up; someone has to pay the bills for it," says Bob von Rekowsky of Fidelity Investments.

We have known from the Roman days that the best way to continue to screw the country is by distracting the people with mass entertainment.  It is entertainment, not religion, that is the opium of the masses!

I sometimes want to scream that people are idiots.  Oops, did I say that? ;)  Spending is simply not worth it to the taxpayers:

Spending lavishly on a short-lived event is, economically speaking, a dubious long-term strategy. Stadiums, which cost a lot and produce minimal economic benefits, are a particularly lousy line of business. (This is why they are usually built by taxpayers rather than by corporations.)

Not difficult to understand.  Corporations would have spent the money if they knew they were going to make more money than what they invested.  They know a loser when they see stadiums, and they also see losers when they see taxpayers.  They, therefore, get the loser taxpayers to build those loser stadiums!

And then there are reports like this:

There’s just a month to go before the Summer Olympics begin in Rio de Janeiro. And the bad news keeps coming.

Or, this:

One Month Before The Olympic Games in Rio, Everything Is A Disaster

So, hey, enjoy this latest installment of taxpayer-funded debauchery, which will be from August 5th; I will be busy with my summer reading ;)

Source

Angels and demons

One way to look at our economic activities is through the conventional framework of selfishness--we do what we do in order to serve our self-interests and that the "invisible hand" of the market produces all wonderful things that all of us get to enjoy.

That self-interest then leads critics to label the system as one that is driven by greed.  Of course, greed is not what most of us would consider to be a virtue.  Even as children, we instinctively understand that greed can be awful.  When we were kids, "greedy pig" was one of the many words that we yelled at siblings when unhappy about another's actions.  Michael Douglas, via his Wall Street character Gordon Gekko, made sure we would always equate the market economy with greed; remember that famous line?

Ricardo Hausmann offers a different way to think about the market:

But a market economy should be understood as a system in which we are supposed to earn our keep by doing things for other people; how much we earn depends on how others value what we do for them. The market economy forces us to be concerned about the needs of others, because it is their need that constitutes the source of our livelihood. In some sense, a market economy is a gift-exchange system; money merely tracks the value of the gifts we give one another. 

I earn my salary as a university faculty.  I get paid for educating students, whether or not I am really contributing to students' education in my classes.

My neighbor, "Archie," runs his own machine tool business, in which he makes products that others use.

I earn my keep by doing things for others.  Archie earns his by doing things for others.

Ah, if only it were that simple.  If only we were able to create a paradise in which we did things for others and everybody lived happily ever after!

We  humans are not always good-hearted.  That view of human nature is also why I, after a great deal of looking around, chose the Bernard Shaw quote as the title for this blog.

Of course, the understanding that we humans are not always good is not new; as James Madison put it:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

We humans are no angels.  There are all kinds of satans within us.  Most of us try our best to control the inner demons.  But, there are many who carry out the demon's instructions.  Government becomes a necessity.  But then, not all those who work in "government" are angels either!

Try as we can, as we do, I suppose we will forever be trapped in this struggle over dealing with our selves that are far from angels doing only good things for other people.

Rare is a government school alum among the Indians in America?

The school that my father and his brother attended in the small village of Pattamadai was established by a family and was a private school.  Even back in those days, they had to pay fees, which was not affordable for many.  Not that grandmother was rich.  To make things worse, she was barely 18 when she was widowed with a two year old and a two-month old, and had to be ultra-careful with how she spent the assets.  (Thus, my father did not even have footwear until he was in high school!)

Literacy was expensive, and was a privilege that only the middle and upper classes could afford.

An independent India understood the importance of education and literacy and established government schools.

In the town where I grew up, we siblings went to a private school. Whenever we kids teased grandmother about her not knowing anything in English, her humorous comeback was (in Tamil, of course) "I didn't pay fees and study in an English-medium school."  Her schooling until the fourth grade was in Tamil.

Thanks to the British, English had become the language of commerce and government in the Subcontinent and, therefore, there was a recognition early on that schooling with English as the medium of instruction might payoff.  At the school that I attended, English was the instructional language.  Some teachers were maniacal enough about English that they faulted us kids if they overheard us chatting in a language other than English.

Horsing around by the playground during the high school reunion, 2011

However, government schools often tended to instruct students in the local vernacular, of which there are plenty in India. Thus, in Tamil Nadu, Tamil was often the medium of instruction in government schools, with a few rare ones offering an English-medium option.

Over the decades, English has gained even more ground as the global language of commerce and science, and the poor in India, too, are acutely aware of it.  They then face roughly two options: send their kids to government schools or to private schools.  The former almost always in the local language and also at atrocious quality, whereas the private schools promise better quality and, more importantly, with English as the instructional language.

Is it any surprise that even the poor choose to send their kids to privately run English-medium schools?

In rural India, 24 to 40 percent of children are enrolled in private schools. In poor urban areas, the figure is at least 65 percent. These low-cost private schools provide even the poorest parents value for their investment. (To give just one example, they are much likelier than government schools to provide instruction in English, a skill that can raise hourly wages by 34 percent.)

This news is not new, really; studies have often reported similar decisions that even the poor in India make:

Researchers tracked 3,000 children who were randomly selected from different social and economic backgrounds in Andhra Pradesh.
They found that in 2002 about one quarter (24 per cent) of seven and eight year olds attended private schools, but by 2009 the rate had almost doubled to 44 per cent.
The study suggests that the trend is fuelled by the availability of low fee-paying private schools, and the perception among parents that children will make better educational progress in private schools.
Parents said they valued English-medium teaching offered by private schools, whereas government schools mostly teach in the regional language, Telugu, the statement added.

The poor--even when illiterate--know the value of a good education for their kids, as I noted in this post from more than three years ago:

many of the schools Tooley visited were tucked away in poorly lit, dilapidated, smelly buildings without toilets, and teachers there did lack government training certificates, and were paid less than in the public system. But Tooley found that in low-cost private schools, across the board, classroom sizes were smaller, and teachers were much more likely to be found teaching during an unannounced visit. They are also achieving better results: the students in private schools outperformed their public school peers in nearly every subject they were tested in.

When there are such consistently strong trends, then one might wonder why the market hasn't jumped on this opportunity.  Schumpeter's column, a couple of months ago, in the Economist was about this very issue:

That poor parents will pay for something the state provides free speaks volumes. India’s state schools pay their teachers far more than private ones, yet they are often worse. Surveys suggest that a quarter or more of government teachers are absent at any given time. Unions prevent the authorities from disciplining slackers or rewarding good teachers.
The willingness of poor parents to pay is also a sign of something more positive: ordinary Indians’ passion for education. Slums like Brahmpuri are full of garish advertisements for makeshift computer-training colleges and English schools. (Workers who are fluent in English earn 34% more than those who are not.) 

Politics and teachers unions make for a nasty combination anywhere on the planet, I suppose.  As Schumpeter notes there, the healthcare industry in India, on the other hand, innovates to serve the domestic and foreign demand.

India's polity recognized this and, as with everything else, they came up with a quota system!

Many of the world's top private schools offer scholarships to smart poor kids. But India's plan is more sweeping: It reserves a quarter of admissions for underprivileged kids. Rules prohibit admission-testing of students, rich or poor, although private schools can set some parameters, such as nearness to the school or gender.

But, a mere quota system does nothing to level the playing field:

One recent morning, teachers Sujata Gupta and Shilki Sawhney asked their class of 4-year-olds to name examples of purple things. The rich kids shouted out "blackberries," "blackcurrant ice cream" and "potassium permanganate," a chemical used to clean fruits and vegetables.
None of the seven low-income kids raised their hands. Unlike the wealthier children, they hadn't learned their colors at home, spoke no English, and were further confused by examples of things they had never heard of.
The teachers, repeating everything in Hindi for the poor kids, then asked anyone wearing a purple T-shirt to stand. Nitin Raj, saucer-eyed and wearing green, rose.
"He's not understanding at all," Ms. Gupta said.

Not to forget that India being the India, class and caste matter a lot even after all these years!:

 Resistance has also come from some private school parents. School officials in New Delhi who asked not to be named told of parents requesting that their children not be seated next to poorer classmates or telling their children not to befriend poorer students.
Sunil and Elizabeth Mehta, who run Muktangan, a nonprofit group that provides English-language education to 1,800 poor children in public schools in Mumbai, said that if parents were made aware of the importance of expanding access to quality education, prejudices would eventually melt away.
“People are socially sensitive if something is explained to them,” Mr. Mehta said. “But you can’t expect them to change right away.”

Nope. Change does not happen overnight. It is a slow incremental process.  But, the good thing is that change is happening.         

It is such complications in India that Americans fail to notice.  But, I don't blame my fellow citizens and our leaders.  After all, they only get to see the successful Indians--here in the US or back in India--and very, very rarely is any of the success stories a product of a government run school in India.  If only politicians here in the US would understand that people like me do not represent the average person in India.

Doing good via the profit motive?

In what seems like eons ago, back in graduate school, when I began my formal intellectual exploration into the role of market and planning (government) in society, I read Amartya Sen's "The profit motive."  Since then, I have attempted to read Sen's works whenever he writes at levels much lower than he is capable of so that even blokes like me can pretend to understand.

The only book of Sen's that I ever purchased was The Argumentative Indian, which is right now on the bookshelf in my office.  A student, "Z," often jokes--yes, more than once it has been--that I should pretty much wear that book title as a name-tag so that strangers will immediately walk away from me.

Oh, I have digressed far away from the profit motive.  One of the challenges has always been with situations, which are in plenty, when the profit motive alone doesn't seem to work.  In fact, in quite a few contexts, the pursuit of profit generates a whole bunch of headaches too.  Troubling issues.

A couple of years ago, as we were struggling to recover from the Great Recession, Sen commented in this essay:

The economic difficulties of today do not, I would argue, call for some “new capitalism”, but they do demand an open-minded understanding of older ideas about the reach and limits of the market economy. What is needed above all is a clear-headed appreciation of how different institutions work, along with an understanding of how a variety of organisations – from the market to the institutions of state – can together contribute to producing a more decent economic world.

In other words, there is a lot yet to be understood regarding the appropriate roles for the state and market in society.  It is ultimate job security in my intellectual interests then!

Thus, it was more than interesting to read in the Harvard Business Review about how a market-based approach can do good to society.  Especially in Africa.

(BTW, I notice that the latest issue of the Economist has a special section on the positive development in Africa.  Will read that through tomorrow.)

This HBR piece begins with: "If you knew how to help feed the hungry — would you?"  Yes.  Of course, yes!

In that essay, the CEO/Chairman of General Mills describes the partnership framework that GM has developed with the UN's bodies, the USAID, and NGOs, and writes:

Though some may see this work as philanthropy, we see it as creating shared value with local African businesses. For example, Nyirefami, in Tanzania, is a company that mills flour. General Mills knows flour. We've been in the milling business more than 140 years, and with Gold Medal, we're still America's leading flour brand. PFS volunteers were able to provide Nyirefami with the technical expertise needed to install a quality control lab, and improve washing and pre-drying operations. With that, Nyirefami increased their milling capacity five-fold, paving the way for the company to buy more grain from local farmers, while also earning the highest level of food certification available in Tanzania.

The fact that he is qualifying the venture with "though some may see this work as philanthropy" itself is a dead giveaway that while not without profits, it is not entirely with profit alone as the motive.  He then goes on to list a few  ways in which businesses can "apply what you do best to reduce poverty and increase economic activity in the developing world."

And then there was another piece in the HBR where the author writes that highly profitable companies like Apple and Google drank a whole lot of milk from the taxpayer teats and now they aren't willing to help the taxpayers.  Reminds me of the many stories I have heard in India of children not helping their aging parents; I suppose this behavior means that corporations are people after all!

Anyway, the author has some sharp words for these behemoths:

Many of the revolutionary technologies that make the iPhone and other products and services "smart" were funded by the U.S. government. Take, for instance, the Internet, GPS, touchscreen display, as well as the latest voice-activated personal assistant, Siri. And Apple did not just benefit from government-funded research activities. It also received its early stage finance from the U.S. government's Small Business Investment Company program. Venture capitalists entered only after government funding had gotten the company to the critical proof of concept.
Other Silicon Valley companies, like Google, have profited in a similarly immense fashion: Google's algorithm was funded by the National Science Foundation. Many of the "new economy" companies that like to portray themselves as the heart of U.S. "entrepreneurship" have very successfully surfed the wave of U.S. government-funded investments. Hence, one secret to Silicon Valley's success has been its active and visible hand, in stark contrast to the Ayn Rand/Adam Smith folklore often bandied about.

In other words, not merely a story of a man, a plan, and an angel investor.  The author raises an important question:

A crucial question to be answered is not just whether the present system is geared toward the government showing a lot of the entrepreneurial courage, but why it is systematically badmouthed, despite its many successes.

Let me remind you that this is in the Harvard Business Review and not Mother Jones!

We are a long way from figuring out the institutional arrangement.  All we know is that we cannot flourish without giving the profit motive the necessary opportunities.  We also know that an excess of that is a disaster.  We are equally aware that government is not all bad, but that too much of it is very bad.  Where does that magical line exist separating government activities from those of the private sector?

Even Amartya Sen can't figure that one out!

Even a tyranny of the meritocracy cannot help a democracy

Whether it is a limited government or an expanded one, a government we shall always need, without which we will look at "the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."  A government requires an executive team, managers, workers, and a process to figure out how to make sure that this government does what we would like it to do.

Easier said.

In this struggle to figure out this problem, it appears that we are a lot less comfortable with some kind of a democracy over other alternatives.  Yes, I am channeling Winston "Bengal Famine" Churchill here, who observed that democracy is the worst form of governance that humans ever invented, except that the alternatives are even worse.  I suppose politics and elections are all about the various levels of discomfort we have with this system.  The discomfort leads even conservatives to worry that the American democracy has become a plutocracy, even as a few other nutcase-conservatives worry that it is becoming a communist society.

If any kind of a inherited right to govern does not appeal to us, then surely the meritorious climbing up to govern should be ok, right?

Yep, a trick question that was!  As this reviewer of Twilight of the Elites notes:

The ideal of meritocracy has deep roots in this country. Jefferson dreamed of a “natural aristocracy.”

What is the problem?

[America] is governed by a ruling class that has proved unworthy of its power. According to Hayes, the failures of the last decade created a deep crisis of authority. We counted on elites to do the right thing on our behalf. The Iraq War, steroid scandal in baseball, abuse cover-up in the Catholic Church, incompetent response to Hurricane Katrina, and, above all, financial crisis showed that they didn’t know enough or care enough to do so.
Twilight of the Elites advances two explanations for these failures. The first emphasizes elite ignorance. People with a great deal of money or power aren’t like the rest of us. Their schedules, pastimes, and even transportation are different to those of ordinary people. This isn’t always because their tastes are distinctive, at least initially. It’s often a job requirement.
In addition to their unusual lifestyles, elite types don’t spend much time with averages Joes. At work, they’re surrounded by subordinates. At home, they live in literally or metaphorically gated communities and socialize with people similar to themselves. Again, there’s nothing sinister about this. Because of their distance from the rest of the population, however, members of the elite often have little idea what’s going on in less rarefied settings.
One consequence, Hayes argues, is that elites have trouble making good decisions. 

Any which way we are damned!

The defect of meritocracy:

 ... is not the inequality of opportunity that it conceals, but the inequality of outcome that it celebrates. In other words, the problem is not that the son of a postal clerk has less chance to become a Wall Street titan than he used to. It’s that the rewards of a career on Wall Street have become so disproportionate to the rewards of the traditional professions, let alone those available to a humble civil servant.

So, what can be done then?

For years now, Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz have been writing about the problems with how the economic rewards are shared, in a language that even I can understand.  Yes, I admit that these two are very much a part of the meritocracy.  The elites.  The NYRB reviews their books (End this depression now! and The price of inequality)

“Unfortunately,” Krugman writes,

we’re not using the knowledge we have, because too many people who matter—politicians, public officials, and the broader class of writers and talkers who define the conventional wisdom—have, for a variety of reasons, chosen to forget the lessons of history and the conclusions of several generations’ worth of economic analysis, replacing that hard-won knowledge with ideologically and politically convenient prejudices.

It might be tempting then to think that perhaps only the well-informed, intelligent, and meritorious ought to lead the governance.  But, it assumes that those with whom we disagree are not intelligent, ill-informed, and not meritorious.  Further, we have plenty of examples of failed leaders with plenty of merit!  Any which way we are damned!


The NYRB reviewer goes on to note:

[The] most striking feature of these two books by Nobel Prize–winning economists is their emphasis on politics. Economists have traditionally insisted on the primacy of economic factors. In studying growing inequality, for instance, they have focused on economic forces like trade and technological change. Only in recent years (in part through the urgings of iconoclasts like Krugman and Stiglitz) has there been a turn to politics to explain America’s distinctive economic challenges—a reorientation that brings economics back toward its original conception as the science of political economy.

So, we are then back to the starting point: how do we deal with this politics and government?

By putting politics center stage, Krugman and Stiglitz greatly advance that cause. Yet neither offers a fully convincing diagnosis, albeit for very different reasons.

We are damned!

[We] have a choice. Politics got us into our economic mess, and only a revitalized politics can get us out of it.

Dream on!

[There] is no society without a governing class. Whether they’re selected by birth, intelligence, or some other factor, some people inevitably exercise power over others. Hayes mounts a powerful critique of the meritocratic elite that has overseen one of the most disastrous periods of recent history. He lapses into utopianism, however, when he suggests that we can do without elites altogether. Like the poor, elites will always be with us. As the word’s original meaning suggests, the question is how they ought to be chosen.

Dream on!

But, I don't know Jack!

From within, the Indian economy seems even less rosy

If and when students ask me about the prospects for the US, I tell them that my long-term bets are always on my adopted country.

The USSR came and went. The Sun briefly rose in Japan, and then sank really fast.  China is only a powder-keg away from the Communist party unraveling and, in any case, the country is far from ready to deal with the coming demographic implosion. 

The "native" country?

I quote the title of Amartya Sen's book, The Argumentative Indian, and tell students that the virtue of all-talk all the time on any topic will continue to constrain its economic progress. (Though, such a take on the title is not what the book is about.)

Thus, the US wins one of two ways: either it genuinely is creative and gets ahead, or it simply waits for others to fall and then be the last one standing.  Like with the case of the Eurozone now.

A few days into the India trip, and I see no evidence to the contrary.  The data points suggest to me that India's success might have been oversold, too.

There is a huge increase in consumption, yes.  Everything from chocolates and chips to computers and cars.  But, long-term investments that could propel continuous productivity enhancements seem to be severely lacking.  From the physical manifestations in roads and power supply to education and health.

Only a few days, and this is rather depressing.

A number of areas where in the US market and non-profit ventures kick in to meet demand are through the government, here in India.  There is, in fact, an expectation that government ought to do certain things, and that it is not delivering those goods and services.

Government is thought of as the default option. And that is what bothers me.  As much as I am far from being a maniacal Republican, and with enormous sympathies coming from the left of the political center, I find it troublesome when people casually sit back expecting the government to do things.

Government, meanwhile, at the federal and state levels, is severely paralyzed--not any surprise given that the best (worst?) of the "argumentative Indians" go on to politics.  The Economist picks up on this point of paralysis:

Investors and others lament policy paralysis. Ministers shy away from big decisions, fearing accusations of graft—though Mr Singh this week urged them at least to get on with infrastructure spending. Meanwhile an obstructive opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has caused gridlock in parliament for much of the year, hoping to tap public fury over corruption.
As a result, the current parliament has done the least work of any in a quarter of a century.  

It is a similar story of paralyzed and incompetent governance at the state level--at least in Tamil Nadu, where I currently am.

The piece in the Economist was jarring for another reason: it refers to the government as "rulers."  In a democracy, leaders do not rule but govern.  In the US, we don't think of the President or a governor as a "ruler."  While the usage in the Indian context could have resulted from a lack of editing, perhaps it was intentional: referring to how much the people are "ruled" by state and federal governments.

It is no surprise, therefore, that the economic health of India is not looking good:

Local and foreign investors are already unnerved by a global slowdown. Political intransigence, continuing corruption, high inflation and the possibility that India will miss its fiscal targets all add to the government’s woes.

Another metric of the economic outlook is the exchange rate, where the rupee seems set to fall even further:

International investors are boosting bets that India’s rupee will extend the worst slide since 2008 as an economic slump deepens, suggesting a lack of confidence in the central bank’s steps to curb exchange-rate volatility. ...
The rupee, the worst performer against the dollar among Asian currencies and of the so-called BRIC nations in 2011, plunged to a record low of 54.305 per dollar on Dec. 15, poised for a third straight quarter of declines, data compiled by Bloomberg show.  

All is not well. I am all the more convinced that the US politicos should stop playing the "compete against India" card.

On the other side of the planet, back home in the US, things are picking up.  Yep, my long-term bets are always on the US.

If only Indians were a little less argumentative :(

Ignorance Is bliss, on complex issues. So, outsource it to ...?

The less people know about important complex issues such as the economy, energy consumption and the environment, the more they want to avoid becoming well-informed, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.
And the more urgent the issue, the more people want to remain unaware, according to a paper published online in APA's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

This reports Science Daily (ht)

It is safe to assume then that people do not want to know about this finding either!

Even more worrisome is this:

people tend to respond by psychologically 'outsourcing' the issue to the government, which in turn causes them to trust and feel more dependent on the government. Ultimately, they avoid learning about the issue because that could shatter their faith in the government.

I tell students that I don't want them to blindly believe in anything, and that the single-most attribute I want to see in them is curiosity.  If they are not curious, then the purpose of education is lost, and with that will come crashing the whole idea of democracy.  To that effect, I remind them not to even trust what I say in the classroom, and that they ought to verify for themselves.  If the study's findings are largely true, then it is all the more important that I wage this battle, right?

On why scholars need to be independent of the government

Good thing that most of us faculty are not scholars and are, at best, pretentious and wannabes eh! :)

The following "Subhashitani" articulates so succinctly the idea of independent thinking:

शिलं किमनलं भवेदनलमौदरं बाधितुं
     पयः प्रसृतिपूरकं किमुन धारकं सारसं ।
अयत्न मलवल्लिकं पथिपटच्चरं कच्चरं
     भजन्ति विबुधा मुधा ह्यहह कुक्षितः कुक्षितः ॥

- वेदान्तदेशिक

Are the grains collected not enough to douse the fire of hunger in the stomach?
Can the water in the lakes not quench the thirst?
Are the rags found on the streets not enough to make clothes to cover us?
Even when all the life necessities are taken care of by nature, why do these scholars serve the King?

- Vedantadeshika

Though, in all fairness, I should note here that the Subhashitani is couched in the contexts of allegiance to the divine, and that message does not appeal to this atheist.  But, the idea of independence in intellectual inquiry is valid though.  And vital.