Inca to India

The samosa was in the news.  Thanks to the demagogue of my adopted land visiting with the demagogue of the old country.

The visiting demagogue and his trophy wife apparently did not bother to touch the samosas that they were served. 

No, that was not the big controversy. 

The brouhaha was because it was a broccoli samosa, which led one commentator to snark that tRump is "a broccoli samosa in an aloo matar world."

Aloo is Hindi for potatoes, and matar is peas.  One big time chef grumbled on NPR: "Broccoli, as far as I know, is not a native vegetable to India. So if it were me, I would want to showcase the vegetables from India."

Ahem, has he forgotten that potatoes are not native to India?  Aloo is pukka firangi ;)

Peru is the geographic home for potatoes.

My paternal grandmother, who lived with us throughout most of my childhood--she died when I was in high school--referred to a bunch of different vegetables as "English vegetables" for a good reason: they were not native to the geography and culture, and they were foreign.  Almost always, anything foreign became "English" thanks to the Bastard Raj.

A family lore is that when her brother went to Bombay many, many decades ago, he stayed with one of the extended family members.  A special, very special, vegetable was served at lunch for him--green beans.  Yes, one of those "English vegetables" that was rare back in the village. 

We now routinely use potatoes.  Almost every single day, anywhere on this planet.  Many of my people stay away from potatoes because of the carbs and the worry over diabetes.

Extending my grandmother's framework, this combination of potatoes with other ingredients is not even English, but is international, if we go by the geographic origins:

Potato: Peru
Chili: South America
Cilantro: Mediterranean

The humble samosa that has potatoes and red chilies and cilantro is not really Indian, is it? ;)

Immigrants gave England their favorite foods. Yet, Brexit?

Way back, a long time ago, when Tony Blair was Britain's Prime Minister, his foreign secretary, Robin Cook, made a comment that was heard around the world.  Cook noted that the chicken tikka masala had become Britain's favorite food that qualified it as the national dish.  He added that it epitomized Britain's involvement with the world and how it adapts to global influences.

The colonial origins of the chicken tikka masala aside, it indeed is remarkable that Britain has been bowled over by curry.  It is a global story to which even the insular Japan is no exception.

The chicken tikka masala displaced fish-and-chips as the national dish.  Was fish and chips truly a "national" dish?

Chips are from potatoes.  Ahem, potatoes did not get to the island, which is becoming increasingly irrelevant, until very recently, well after the white man's not-so-friendly first visits to South America.

So, the chicken tikka masala is recent.  Chips are only a tad older in the English cuisine (yes, an oxymoron!)  How about the fried fish itself?

It turns out that even the fried fish is not particularly English!

Whaaaaat?  Don't tell me that the Pope is not Catholic! ;)

Apparently this fried fish concoction is from the Sephardic cuisine that Jews brought with them after they were expelled from the Iberian peninsula.

As religious violence worsened, many fled Portugal and resettled in England, bringing with them culinary treasures founded in Sephardic cuisine—including fish.
Peshkado frito (in Andalusian dialect, pescaíto frito) was one of them. The dish of white fish, typically cod or haddock, fried in a thin coat of flour, was a favorite particularly among Sephardic Jews, who fried it on Friday nights to prepare for the Sabbath, as the Mosaic laws prohibited cooking. Allegedly, the batter preserved the fish so it could be eaten cold, and without sacrificing too much flavor, the following day.

What a fascinating and complex story about a relatively simple food!

Once it was introduced, well, the rest was history.

It was a hit. Fish prepared “in the Jewish manner” was sold on the streets of London on any given day. And at the end of the week, eating fish on Friday was a part of religious observance for Jews and Catholics alike—as “fish fasting” to avoid consuming warm-blooded animals has been a part of the Catholic tradition for centuries.* Though both groups were religious minorities at the time, fried fish became a popular secular dish, too.

Here's another interesting twist to this globalization story: The writer who provides us the fish-and-chips story is Simon Majumdar.  That last name is a dead give away about the Bengali origin.  Wikipedia offers the details:

Majumdar was brought up in Rotherham near Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England^[3] by his Welsh mother and Indian father, a middle child out of four children.^[4] His father Pratip "Pat" Majumdar was born in Kolkata

Even the guy who explains the globalization story of fish-and-chips literally owes his life to globalization!  Oh, he is now an American citizen!

If only the narrow-minded, racist, xenophobic people around the world paused to think and appreciate it all!

Trend lines, headlines, and politics

One of the two brand new courses that I will teach in the coming academic year will be about how much the world has changed--for the better--and yet the news headlines will have us believe otherwise.  (Instead of working on the syllabus, here I am "wasting" away my time!)

Consider one of the many awesome things that we have accomplished--thanks to every government in the world advancing literacy and spending money on education, children from any background can now attend school. (Sadly, there are countries where girls are not educated.)

What a fantastic cause for celebration!.  It is phenomenal an achievement that of all the humans who are 15 years or older, only about 13% is illiterate..  We humans deserve credit for making such a world happen.

However, to look at that kind of progress and to merely engage in self-congratulations is, well, not what I do.  To begin with, that is not my job--I am a critic, by choice and by profession.

But, the change for the better does not mean that we can rest easy; after all, there are a gazillion ways in which we ought to work towards improving the state of the world, for humans and non-humans alike.  In this context, if we were to merely engage in rah-rah about literacy even for the disadvantaged, we begin to overlook the serious troubles there.

Does one imagine, for instance, that a government school in rural Uttar Pradesh is anywhere near the quality of the school that I (and the commenter) went to?  Why are the kids in rural Uttar Pradesh condemned to those godawful schools where teachers might not even come to class, leave alone being horrible teachers in the classroom, while kids in Neyveli get much better education?  Not the kids' fault that they were accidentally born to their parents who live in a certain area, right?

Now, think about how education is merely one out of the gazillion ways in which the accidental birth makes a huge difference in one's life.

Most of us in the political left-of-center always worry ourselves to death that such inequality that arises for no fault ought to be addressed via public policies.  Even while celebrating the fantastic reductions in extreme and absolute poverty, we worry about the uneven competition that exists only because of the accident of birth.

My go-to-expert on these topics, Branko Milanovic, has written in plenty about these issues.  One of his recent empirical analysis showed how "the entire world’s economy is lifted by the open exchange of goods, but this growth is unevenly distributed. The “global upper middle class” — that is, working class individuals in wealthy nations — take it on the chin as less skilled jobs move to poorer nations. Meanwhile, the global middle class and the very wealthy benefit tremendously."

Some of us--yes, I have conveniently inserted myself into an excellent company!--have argued for years that this calls for a new social contract in which we can appropriately compensate the people and communities who lose in this global win.  I yell about this at other places too ;)

"The sensible solution for a wealthy nation is to open its borders to as much trade as possible, but to tax the beneficiaries of free trade to lift up those who lose out."  It is so obvious.  But, apparently obvious only to a few of us who have no political power to make this happen :(




Source

The coming elections will be nasty ... and critical

It was from my life in California that I understood the place-based politics that I have been worried about forever since.  Life in the Central Valley was nothing like the California that people have in mind.  I used to tell people that the SoCal versus NorCal (Southern California versus Northern California) was an incorrect framework, and that the realistic one is coastal California versus inland California.

Coastal California is urban, cosmopolitan, and everything that we think of when we think about the state.  It is liberal in its politics and culture.  People have no hassles relating themselves to the world.

The inland communities and people gave me a very different taste of the Golden State.  When What's the matter with Kansas? came out, I could easily relate to the discussions there because the dynamics were similar to what I had experienced in the southern San Joaquin Valley. 

Moving to Oregon reinforced the place-based understanding.  It turned out that the state being described as liberal and full of hippies was one hell of a gross caricature.  There were--and are--some hard core conservatives, whose outlook was/is no different from the population in California's Central Valley.

All these are why I never dismissed the possibility of tRump winning not only his adopted party's nomination but also the general election.  And I was worried sick about tRump, even as the "progressive" Berniacs were enthusiastically beating up on Hillary Clinton.

I was thinking about all these as a result of reading this compelling essay about the gilets jaunes (the yellow vests).  When we think about France, we think in terms that are comparable to reducing California to its coasts, or Oregon to its liberals.  As much as there is a lot more in these two states, there is plenty more to France as well.  The neglected are pissed off, and for good reasons; the "populist anger as the inevitable response to the widening gulf between those “rooted” in a particular place and cosmopolitans at home anywhere"

To most of us--yes, including you, the reader--the world is our larger home within which we have a physical address as our "home."  We ask ourselves "in an age of massive displacement and global travel, does the concept of home even make sense anymore?"  But, this is not a question that tRump's base or the gilets jaunes or the Brexiters ask themselves.

This struggle is bound to worsen in the US if the economic benefits from all-things-global are not accompanied by constructive redistribution policies and programs.  Unfortunately, the party that fuels and funnels the rage of the "rooted" is also opposed to redistribution of any kind.  Let us see if any of the Democratic contenders are able to overcome this important challenge.  I hope they will.

"dumbass economics"? "holy cow"!

The President had only a few hours left in the deadline that he had set for himself.  After all the bravado, he meekly extended the deadline by another month.

The deadline was regarding the tariffs on steel and aluminum.

The Trump administration has decided to hold off on imposing most of its tariffs on imported steel and aluminum until at least June 1.
Tariffs were scheduled to take effect at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday on imports from Canada, the largest U.S. supplier of steel and aluminum, as well as Mexico, Argentina, Australia, Brazil and the EU.

Daniel Drezner calls these tariffs and other aspects of trump's policies as "dumbass economics."

The case for protectionism is weaker than at any moment in this century. Neither the Trump administration nor its supporters have any valid economic or national security reason for these tariffs, and even tariff supporters admit it. Still, actual trade policy will get worse in the short run. The current schism on the issue has little to do with economics and everything to do with identity, and the metamorphosis of this debate spells trouble for defenders of the open global economy.
The economic arguments in favor of freer trade are pretty darn strong.

Indeed they are.  But, try explaining that to 63 million voters!

Much of the country views trade policy through the lens of race and identity. Temple University political scientist Alexandra Guisinger has demonstrated that support for protectionism correlates with who is being protected. Simply put, tariffs are more popular with Americans when they are thought to benefit white workers.

Ok, then!

What the demagogue does not tell his voters, or perhaps he doesn't even understand, is this:

To date, the gains and pains of globalization and automation have been felt mostly by the manufacturing sector. In the future, the gains and pains will be felt by professional and service-sector jobs.

trump and his base can feel good about themselves over the steel and aluminum tariffs.  But, try as they might, they are doomed to fail in their attempts to close the American trade doors.  We are merely at the beginnings of a new phase of globalization.  The 200-year story is rapidly taking a new turn:

Service jobs have been shielded from globalization because they require people to be face-to-face, or at least near each other. For most services, you can’t put them into a container and ship them from China to New York. So global competition was deflected by the shield of high face-to-face costs.
Digital technology, however, is opening a pipeline for direct international wage competition.

We are vastly underestimating the impacts of technology.

There’s a point at which the exponential path of technological growth crosses the straight line of human expectation, and it’s the point at which the real power of this technology that we’ve alternately over- and underestimated fully dawns on us. I call it the “holy cow” moment. We haven’t quite reached it yet

Yep, we’re getting close to the holy-cow moment.  Before that, we are going to have lots and lots of "holy shit!" moments though, thanks to 63 million voters of America!

Mama says there'll be days like this ...

Every visit to India, I shamelessly ask my mother to make some of my favorite dishes.  Of course, everything that she cooked was divine.  But, even there, we all had our own favorites.

A few years ago, I asked if she could make keppa-dosai (கேப்பை தோசை).  Mother's reply was not what I expected.  She said that it was not easy as it was when we were young to get the needed keppai.  And the couple of times she tried, apparently it did not pass her quality standards.

It has been a long, long time--decades actually--since I had keppa-dosai.  Some day, when I am old, maybe I will have a moment like in Ratatouille!

It is millet that I am talking about.  Yep, millet.  As kids, my brother and I loved drinking Ragimalt, which was an industrial millet concoction that was a much better alternative to Bournvita.  My grandmother thought it was hilarious that we were so much into what she referred to as keppai-kanji (கேப்பை கஞ்சி).

That millet was in India long before the "English vegetables" arrived.  Long before the polished white rice.  Long before granulated white sugar.

In the process of rapidly modernizing, we are also rapidly losing our agrobiodiversity; it is declining in many countries:

Generally, agrobiodiversity is significantly lower in wealthy nations, where the industrial food system pushes toward genetic uniformity.

The wealthier we get, the more we gravitate towards inexpensive sources of calories, continuing along the direction in which we started moving ever since we invented agriculture.

Global shifts of urbanization, migration, markets and climate can potentially be compatible with agrobiodiversity, but other powerful forces are undermining it. The imperatives of producing food at lower cost and higher yield clash with efforts to raise high-quality food and protect the environment. The future of agrobiodiversity hangs in the balance.

It hangs in the balance, for certain.

It's a wonderful life ... if you are rich!

“The salary has been at the same level ... I haven’t seen my pay go up in five years.”

One might immediately think that it was somebody in the US who said that, right?  After all, here I am in the US where wage stagnation has been a puzzle to experts, leave alone the regular people.

But, that was from Norway.  From a 49-year old man in Oslo.

His lament resonates far beyond Nordic shores. In many major countries, including the United States, Britain and Japan, labor markets are exceedingly tight, with jobless rates a fraction of what they were during the crisis of recent years. Yet workers are still waiting for a benefit that traditionally accompanies lower unemployment: fatter paychecks.
Why wages are not rising faster amounts to a central economic puzzle.

What is going on, right?

The reasons for the stagnation gripping wages vary from country to country, but the trend is broad.

Same trend, different reasons.  Yet, the experts pretend that economics is a science, and they even managed to set up a prize (ab)using Nobel's name!

On the other hand, unlike the working stiff who have not seen a wage increase in years, there are quite a few who profit phenomenally from the same system.  As F. Scott Fitzgerald put it,:"Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me."  How different is their life?  Here's one example: If you have enough money, you can buy yourself a citizenship in quite a few countries!

Between 30 and 40 countries have active economic-citizenship or residence programmes, says Kälin, and another 60 have provisions for one in law. Some demand a straight cash donation, others investment in government bonds or the purchase of property. Some take a longer-term view of the potential economic benefits, offering passports to entrepreneurs who will set up a local company and create a minimum number of jobs. The required investment ranges from upwards of $10,000 (Thai residence, for instance) to more than $10m (fast-track residence in Britain). In some countries the original investment can be withdrawn after several years.

Do not forget that the fascist campaigned about the welfare of the middle class for whom his heart supposedly bleeds, but has a son-in-law who peddles this passport for sale:

The use of EB-5 by Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, to lure Chinese investors into his family’s development projects has also tainted the programme. Some senators want it scrapped. Congress is due to decide soon whether to extend it.

Ahem, if you believe that Congress will scrap this passport-for-sale program, then I have a bridge to sell you for a million dollars!

The typical passport buyer is unlikely to settle, will care little about her new country’s politics and will have no interest in defending its values. Unless her new citizenship is American – the United States is particularly hot on extracting taxes from all its citizens – she may well pay her new nation no taxes. The normal means of acquiring citizenship acknowledges that there is a cultural component: naturalisation typically takes years and requires an applicant to establish a real connection to their new country. An industry whose main purpose is to allow people to skip those queues does not.

So long, losers; eat your damn cakes!

Let's go, people!

I went to graduate school because I thought that I would find answers to the pressing questions of development.  Within a couple of years, I realized that plenty of highly capable thinkers had already thought up everything that I was worried about.  If everything had already been discussed, then what the hell?

I started understanding that addressing the human condition was not really about finding technical solutions.  Instead, it came down to the power of persuasion and, ultimately, politics.  I would no longer be fooled by fancy-shmancy data-driven models.

Which is also when I seriously started thinking about persuading others through easy to understand approaches.  One of the big topics then was free trade, and NAFTA in this part of the world.  I did not oppose free trade, especially after my experiences in the socialist India.  But, my logic told me that freely moving goods and capital alone merely provides advantages to those who are better-off.  I wanted free movement of people also. 

I went to talk about this with one of the professors.  He disagreed with me.  He gave me the same old textbook argument of how the movement of capital will counter and complement the controls on movement of labor.  I was not convinced.  I wrote an essay and sent that to Economic and Political Weekly.  Of course it was not published--I bet that it was one horribly written essay, stylistically and content-wise.

Over the years, I have been more convinced than ever that globalization ought to include freer, if not completely free, movement of labor.  Yes, I know that this exactly what the fascist thug campaigned against and for which he was rewarded with 63 million votes.  But, hey, the fascist can and will bullshit and lie.  But, the truth cannot be simply tweeted away.

One of the best contemporary thinkers on the distributional aspects of globalization, Branko Milanovic, whom I have quoted before, writes this:

income gaps are unlikely to be eliminated. Which, in turn, shows the importance of migration.  If a borderless cosmopolitan world is to be achieved (an objective with which I agree but see enormous political difficulties in reaching it), migration is absolutely essential. But as economic migration faces increasing obstacles in rich countries (and, it has to be added, not solely because of xenophobia but for economic reasons as well), the ideal of a world “without injustice of birth” recedes.

Yes, the injustice of birth.  Click here if you need a refresher on that.

Milanovic concludes:

I am very sympathetic to the borderless world but to believe that it can be achieved through trade alone, and without significant migration, is unrealistic. And once we say “migration”, we immediately open the Pandora’s box that the most recent elections in Europe and the United States have shown is a reality, not an imagination. Thus, our new “intellectual revolution” should be rather to address the issue of migration and citizenship than free trade. Free trade alone cannot solve world’s problems.

We need to think about migration and citizenship in new ways.  And we need to be able to think about that while dealing with the fascist thug's tweets and rants channeling his narrow and nativist takes on migration and citizenship.  Eventually, in the long run, truth will prevail.  But then, we need to also keep in mind that wonderful line: In the long run we are all dead.

What we have here is failure to communicate

Back in high school, it was physics in which I was most interested.  It was that common interest, especially in all things quantum, that brought this guy and me together.

But, as I grew older, the humanity around me interested me even more than physics did.  It became more and more a puzzle to me that it was possible for humans to send a few humans to the moon and bring them back, but were were/are unable to solve basic problems here on earth.  I started traveling a different road.

Turns out that the problems of humanity are not at all easy to solve.  In fact, we are hell bent on making things worse.

It does not mean that my interest in physics has died out either.  Which is why when Brian Greene came to campus, I was not going to miss that opportunity.  Which is why when Scientific American has an essay about quantum communication, well, I had to read it.

I am not going to comment on the physics there.  Because, well, I have no expertise to say anything meaningful.  I am not even sure if I understood the nuances being discussed there.

But, there is something else that I want to comment about.

Consider the following names mentioned in that essay:
Hatim Salih
Jian-Wei Pan
Yuan Cao
Yu-Huai Li
Tae-Gon Noh

Consider this excerpt from that Scientific American essay:

While living in England in 2009, a young man named Hatim Salih read Noh’s paper and asked himself, “Why didn’t I think of that?” He had a degree in electronics but had taught himself quantum physics after reading a few popular books by Roger Penrose and attending seminars in York . A year later Salih returned to his native Sudan, where he marketed solar panels, and a friend invited him to be a visiting researcher at the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. He did not have a PhD, but with a colleague there and two other theorists at Texas A&M University, he took “the logic of counterfactual communication to its natural conclusion.”
...
Salih then founded a company, called Qubet Research, to monetize the idea.

Take a look at this photograph from that same piece:

Now, consider this photograph:

Photo at the Fifth Solvay Conference, in 1927
Source

If only this current president and his minions understood that 2017 is not 1927.

The Reagan-Thatcher revolution comes to an end. Long live the revolution!

One of the Seinfeld episodes was about the Bizarro World in which Elaine finds herself.  Up is down, and left is right.  It is chaos, until "normalcy" returns.

While Seinfeld was inventing scenarios, we are living in a Bizarro World.  Consider the following from a recent speech:

“We must remain committed to developing free trade and investment.”
No one will emerge as a winner in a trade war,”

And, to put it more poetically:

“Pursuing protectionism is like locking oneself in a dark room,” he said. “Wind and rain may be kept outside, but so is light and air.”

That person, the champion of free trade and openness?  China's president, Xi Jinping.

Yes, China's president "positioned himself as a defender of globalization and free trade."  Xi also said:

Countries, he said, “should view their own interests in their broader context and refrain from pursuing their own interests at the expense of others.”

Up is down, left is right.

But, that alone does not make this a Bizarro World, unless the previously staunch defenders of free trade have also flipped, right?  They have.

The GOP's standard-bearer, the president-elect, campaigned on the very ideas of protectionism and putting America first.  Remember?  The Republican Party has been merrily going along with this bizarro approach.  Imagine that!  The Republicans have lost faith in the market!  The same Republicans who complain that Democrats are socialists.  The same Republicans who cheered on the criticisms that Obama is a communist.  Welcome to the bizarro world, in which now the president of a "communist" country is the defender of free trade and openness, while the leader of the "free world" wants to tax imports and close the borders!

Chinese trade experts with government ties have already hinted that if the Trump administration imposes barriers to Chinese goods, they are ready to retaliate through steps like switching aircraft contracts from Boeing to Airbus, diverting food import contracts to rival countries like Brazil and possibly making it more difficult for Apple to sell iPhones in China.

Head-spinning?  Get used to it; after all, the demagogue has not even been sworn in yet!

As Global Times, a nationalistic Chinese newspaper controlled by the Communist Party, put it in an editorial this month: “There are flowers in front of the China Commerce Ministry gate, but sticks as well, hidden behind the door. Both are waiting for the Americans.”

The demagogue does not care for flowers, as his tweets and his entire campaign showed us.  Unlike the wimpy Obama and the Democrats, the Chinese will bring their guns to the fight.

May we please work on a new social contract?

In the old, old days, I would wander in the library and read whatever interested me.  The key word is "interested"--because there were plenty of occasions when I was interested in what I read but had no idea what the author was writing about.  It is like watching an avant garde movie, La Sapienza for instance, and then later reading up to understand the subtext.

These days, I don't aimlessly walk around in libraries.  I browse from home.  Saves me a whole lot of walking, but my fingers ache! ;)

It is through browsing that I came across this interview in the Harvard Business Review.  I got excited because it features everything that I talk and write about: Globalization, labor, robots, footloose corporations, welfare safety net, gig economy, college education, ... Aren't you, too, impressed with what the interview covers?

HBR's editor interviews some guy who was the head of some firm that I had never heard about.  Let's be honest here; I can't know it all! ;)  The guy is Jeffrey Joerres who apparently " led ManpowerGroup for 15 years before stepping down in 2015."  I had to check with Wikipedia (more achy fingers) to find out how big a firm that is.

I want to focus on a couple of observations that Joerres offers in that interview:

Companies are doing more “micro footprinting,” and that takes a nomadic mentality: You’re ready to pick up and move when required. Large footprinting, on the other hand, means you’re committed to a community for better or worse. More and more, companies will need to take a dual approach, establishing large locations and more-temporary, smaller operations at the same time.

Did you also catch that sentence? "Large footprinting, on the other hand, means you’re committed to a community for better or worse."  In the old days, companies were committed to the communities that were their home.  GM in Flint, Michigan, was that classic model.  But, those days ended almost all of a sudden.  Gone.  Which means that local governments and people can/should never, never, never, assume that a corporation will come to stay for the long haul.

Elsewhere, Joerres says:

In many ways, what we have now in the U.S. is similar to the early 19th century, when the Luddites first worried that machines were going to steal their jobs. We must deal with the reality that when full-scale robotics and AI arrive in a broad-based, affordable, easily justifiable way, we’ll see enormous waves of workers put out of work and ill prepared to take on very different jobs. This is going to create challenges that our institutions are not ready for.

It is one thing for a semi-baked nutcase like me to keep saying that.  As my old grad school professor made sure we understood, it is not what you say but who you are when you say that.  In this case, plenty will/should listen to what Joerres says.

We are not ready for the changes that are coming.  Not only are we far from ready, the existing system is terribly broken:

Our institutions are inadequate. Look at unemployment compensation, welfare, Social Security—these were all put in place in the middle of the past century. And they were based on certain assumptions: that when you lost your job, you would go through a process and on the other side find a job that you’d then have for a long time. Today that’s not going to happen. Look at the gig economy, look at parsed work—all these models just allow us to move faster. My dad had a second job. He went to a gas station after he got home from his first job, and he ate his dinner in between. Well, second jobs look different now. Uber is a second job. So what do you do when someone is collecting unemployment and takes a job with Uber to moonlight while he’s in training for a new full-time job? Should he lose food stamps or health care because he’s earning a little extra money to get by? Our systems look broken because they’re trying to fit things into the way the labor markets worked in the past.

Ahem, how long have I been saying this by yelling all the time about the need for an updated social contract?

Ok, are universities the panacea?

The same goes for broad-access universities. They’re built on the old labor models. They’re not turning out graduates with the skills companies need. So we have to refashion these institutions that are so important to our society.

In case you are wondering what a "broad-access university" is, well, those are the overwhelming majority that are not the elite research universities and liberal arts colleges.  The "broad-access university" description includes the university where I teach.  Again, in how many different op-eds and blog-posts have I been complaining about the old-fashioned higher education structure?

I love a solution that Joerres offers:

I think we need an iterative model. Why does it have to be all in or all out? Why can’t someone be on partial welfare? Or on partial unemployment compensation? If a worker loses her job that paid $50,000 a year but can only find a new job for $40,000, her unemployment compensation goes away, but she has lost $10,000. Why don’t we make up the difference for her for another six months because she had what it took to go out and find a job? Some people might see that as a giveaway. It’s not. It’s a small price to pay to encourage that worker to get back into the market. I’d rather pay someone to be in the market than out of the market.

Exactly!  If only we could talk about such important issues, instead of the wasted time and energy on crap!

We have met the enemy. It is us!

A few weeks ago, I wrote here--yet again!--about how reworking the social contract years ago could have helped in many ways. It is darn frustrating that something that has been so obvious was never the majority view, and continues to be marginalized. All I can do is keep talking/writing about it by pointing out that there are others with real influence--unlike my irrelevant status at work in life.

Enough about me.  Let us get to the issues, right?

Joseph Stiglitz, who is a recipient of the Nobel Prize in economics and whose heart has always been in the correct place, writes:

Under the assumption of perfect markets (which underlies most neoliberal economic analyses) free trade equalizes the wages of unskilled workers around the world. Trade in goods is a substitute for the movement of people. Importing goods from China – goods that require a lot of unskilled workers to produce – reduces the demand for unskilled workers in Europe and the US.
This force is so strong that if there were no transportation costs, and if the US and Europe had no other source of competitive advantage, such as in technology, eventually it would be as if Chinese workers continued to migrate to the US and Europe until wage differences had been eliminated entirely. Not surprisingly, the neoliberals never advertised this consequence of trade liberalization, as they claimed – one could say lied – that all would benefit.

Way back in graduate school, which is when I was getting introduced to various political economic thoughts that I had to quickly understand after years spent in science and technology,  And that was also when I got to understand some of the discussions on fairness and social contract.  I have loved that idea of "social contract" since then.  Stiglitz writes about the social contract:

But they can’t have it both ways: if globalization is to benefit most members of society, strong social-protection measures must be in place. The Scandinavians figured this out long ago; it was part of the social contract that maintained an open society – open to globalization and changes in technology. Neoliberals elsewhere have not – and now, in elections in the US and Europe, they are having their comeuppance.
Globalization is, of course, only one part of what is going on; technological innovation is another part. But all of this openness and disruption were supposed to make us richer, and the advanced countries could have introduced policies to ensure that the gains were widely shared.
Instead, they pushed for policies that restructured markets in ways that increased inequality and undermined overall economic performance

If I--a nobody--am pissed off that nobody listened to me, think about Stiglitz who has been very much a part of the domestic and international political institutions and, yet, has not been able to bend the political will on this.  I wonder how angry he is!

Stiglitz writes that "the problem was not globalization, but how the process was being managed."  And that is also the point in this NY Times editorial.

Trade and globalization have been miraculous for hundreds of millions all around the world.  Without that economic dynamic, we would not have had the flourishing middle class populations in China and India, for instance.  When talking with my parents yesterday, my father remarked that a couple of decades ago, he could not afford to even pay for the autorickshaws and, instead, he and my mother used the public transport buses if they wanted to visit with people,  which they loved doing.  Two decades of trade later, there are now Chinese and Indian tourists traveling all over the world--the kind of travel that not too long ago was almost exclusively an American possibility because only Americans were rich enough for that.  

If only we would recognize that the world is much better off now.  The problem is not globalization but our collective failure to understand the urgency, the importance, of rewriting the social contract in which those who are losing out will be compensated.  

Those damn Chinese and Indians! Vietnamese and Bangladeshis too?

Evan Osnos--remember him?--writes about tagging along with Zhang Yuanan, who had been sent to the GOP convention by Caixin Media, a Chinese news organization, in order to understand Trump and his blame-China rhetoric.  Osnos writes:

Zhang stopped at a table of T-shirts that spelled out “TRUMP” in rhinestones. The seller was wearing an American-flag cowboy hat and an American-flag shirt with the sleeves torn off. Zhang asked, “Do you know where they are made?” The seller said the rhinestones came from Korea, but he wasn’t sure about the shirts. “O.K., thank you,” she said, and studied the tags. Made in Haiti.

Of course, very few trinkets carry the Made in America tags.

She mused, “Why do you think Americans want those low-end manufacturing jobs to come back here?” In China people don’t exactly love their jobs making peppermint tins. “China wants to upgrade its manufacturing chain,” she said. ...
“It’s true—a lot of manufacturing jobs are now in China.” What mystified her was Trump’s promise to bring the jobs back. “If it’s not China, it’s still not going to be the U.S. It’s going to be in Vietnam and other countries.”

As I have blogged often, like here, if only the Trump and Bernie people would have understood that!

If the dynamics of economic geography are so basic, then why are the millions of Trump and Bernie people angry at China and India for stealing "our" jobs?

Greg Mankiw tackles that in his column at the NY Times.

According to a CBS News/New York Times poll conducted last month, only 35 percent of registered voters thought the United States gained from globalization, while 55 percent thought it lost.

Even as we enjoy the low, low price of everything, on top of the free email, Faccebook, and everything else, only a third think the US gained from the integration with the global economy?  What gives?

As Mr. Mansfield and Ms. Mutz put it, “trade preferences are driven less by economic considerations and more by an individual’s psychological worldview.”

It is not about the evidence--like a tshirt for $4.99--but the "feelings" that drive this anger.  But, Trump's base is mostly angry white men, right?  How come the lower middle class blacks and Latino voters aren't that angry then?  And how do we understand the Democratic Party's vote-base?  Reihan Salam notes:

Native-born black men, in contrast, might compare their circumstances favorably with those of their own fathers, who often faced intense racial discrimination. Similarly, Latino immigrants of modest means generally believe themselves to be better off than they would have been in their native countries. That’s no small thing. In this sense, at least, upwardly mobile working-class blacks and Latinos have more in common with upwardly mobile college-educated whites than they do with working-class whites. And in this sense, at least, the fact that the Democratic Party is now an alliance of college-educated whites and working-class minority voters makes a certain kind of sense.

So, any ray of sunshine in all these?  Back to Mankiw:

The more years of schooling people have, the more likely they are to reject anti-globalization attitudes.

Oh, ok.  But, then he also adds this:

In the long run, therefore, there is reason for optimism. As society slowly becomes more educated from generation to generation, the general public’s attitudes toward globalization should move toward the experts’.
The short run in which we find ourselves now, however, is another story.

Oh yeah. Of course!  It is consistent with the wonderful line in economic thinking: In the long run, we are all dead! ;)

I want you to celebrate this presidential election

No, not the one here in the US.  Our elections stink so bad that we will be better off if I didn't write anything about it.

The presidential election in Peru is the one that I am referring to.

Why Peru?  Not because of the potato.  You ready?

Think about Peru, and its location.  In South America, and Spanish as the language, right?  Think about the last names from that part of the world.  Next door in Bolivia, the fearless leader is Evo Morales.  On the other side is Ecuador's Rafael Correa.  You all set?

Ok, you are a sharp thinker, who is well informed.  So, you know where this is going.  I will get to it then.

The last names of the two presidential candidates in the Peruvian election: Fujimori and Kuczynski.  Read that again.  Would you ever expect the last names of the presidential candidates in a Spanish speaking South American country to be a Japanese name and a Polish name?  Sit, take a deep breath, and calm yourself down.

Yes, the 41-year old Keiko Fujimori is the daughter of the former president, Alberto Fujimori, who disgraced himself after a decade in office and is now behind bars.  The senior Fujimori's parents immigrated to Peru from Japan.  Over the years of following the Shining Path and how Alberto Fujimori put an end to that violent group, I was familiar with the story of his parents' immigration and, therefore, his fleeing to Japan when the scandals caught up with him.

Pedro Pablo Kuczynski's story is new to me.  He is the same age as Alberto Fujimori--77 years.  Kuczynski's parents, too, came to Peru at about the same time that Fujimori's parents immigrated from Japan.  In Kuczynski's case?

His Jewish father, a doctor, fled Berlin after Adolf Hitler came to power; his Swiss mother taught literature

Wikipedia offers more about the presidential candidate's family;

Pedro Pablo Kuczynski Godard has been married twice, first to Jane Dudley Casey (daughter of Joseph E. Casey, member of the U.S. House for the 3rd district of Massachusetts), their offspring being corporate executive and technology entrepreneur, Carolina Madeleine Kuczynski, the journalist Alex Kuczynski,^[9] and John-Michael Kuczynski. His current wife is Nancy Lange, with whom he has had a daughter. Kuczynski's younger brother Miguel Jorge is a fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge; and their first cousin is Jean-Luc Godard, the renowned French-Swiss film director. Kuczynski's brother-in-law Harold Varmus received the Nobel Prize for cancer research in 1989.

Fujimori v. Kuczynski, in a Spanish speaking South American country, is one awesome example of the wonderfully globalized cultures that characterize our contemporary existence.  Here's to wishing for a lot more of such mixing of ideas and cultures, but because people want to move and not because they are forced to move.

Let them eat cakes ... made only by us!

Consider this:

[The] decision to manufacture in the U.S. isn’t solely about dollars and cents. Rather, it’s a function of the quality of the U.S. workforce—its noteworthy productivity and its easy familiarity with lean-factory principles—as well as the need for companies to react quickly to changes in domestic consumer demand. As Jeff Immelt, the C.E.O. of General Electric, put it in 2013: “Today, the product is the process, more or less. If you look at an aircraft engine, the content of labor is probably less than five per cent. We have two hours of labor in a refrigerator. So it really doesn’t matter if you make it in Mexico, the U.S., or China. Today it’s really about globalization, not about outsourcing; it’s how do I capture markets faster than the competition?”

Two hours of labor into the making of a refrigerator.  Just two hours of labor?  If you are like me, you have never thought about how much labor goes into the making of a fridge, right?  The fridge that has revolutionized our lives.

America manufactures a whole lot of stuff, yes.  It is not the strength of the manufacturing sector that is the problem, but the fact that the strong manufacturing sector does not generate the kinds of jobs that it used to in the past.  A point that Dan Drezner makes with data:

The problem isn’t that the United States doesn’t have a vibrant manufacturing sector. The problem is that sector does not generate the job numbers that used to be associated with manufacturing:

I wish politicians will make this distinction clear.

Both Trump and Sanders downplay the enormous economic benefits of globalization for American consumers of all incomes, and their proposed solutions are vague and could well be harmful if implemented. But their words resonate with many voters, because they articulate an important truth: free trade has created major winners and major losers in the U.S. economy, and the losers—mostly blue-collar workers—have received little or no help.

I have often blogged about my own stand on these: to a developing country, manufacturing and exporting provides the economic ladder going up.  To tell them that they should not "compete" against us seems like a variation of let 'em eat cakes.  Thus, if they manufacture stuff that then displaces workers here, then what is required is a new social contract that reflects a new reality, as much as the New Deal was in response to the economic situation of those times.  However, reworking the social contract requires thoughtful and responsible politics, which apparently is rarer than a unicorn!

Kerala: No country for young men

One of the greatest of all hushed-up stories is this: forty-five years ago, when Neil Armstrong opened the Eagle's door and climbed down on to the surface of the moon, he was welcomed by a Keralite who also offered him a glass of hot tea.

Of course, that did not happen.  But, it is a tired-old joke from the old country that easily highlights the presence of Keralites (as in a person from Kerala, which is a state in southern India) seemingly in every corner of this planet--and on the moon too.

According to a recent survey, these expatriates number 1,625,653.  Where are they?

Among them, 1426740 are in the Gulf countries.

As in the countries by the Persian Gulf.  Other estimates place the number even higher.

These expatriates send quite a lot of money back to their homeland:

Kerala has set a new record in remittances this year by already reporting a whopping 36 per cent year-on-year spike in inflows as of June-end at Rs 75,883 crore.

The 75,883 crores of rupees are the equivalent of about 12 billion US dollars, which perhaps makes the expatriates the state's single largest export.

Kerala is, of course, only one example in a world where there are many of us who live in countries that are different from where we were born:

There are more than 230 million international migrants worldwide, which is more than the population of the world’s fifth most populous country, Brazil.

Out of those 230 million, 1.6 million are from Kerala.  The twelve billion dollars from these expat Keralites were about a sixth of what India earned through its diaspora:

India received $70 billion, more than the value of its exports of information-technology services.

More than the IT exports!

The Kerala, and India, stories might be big in the magnitude, but there are others with more impressive numbers:

In Tajikistan, as we have previously reported, migrant workers send home the equivalent of 47% of the country's GDP, and as many as half of the Tajik men in working-age are now believed to be living abroad. Similarly, an estimated 40% of Somalia’s population depend on remittances and need the cash to buy food and medicine.

All these lead to an interesting question: how much do these remittances help with local economic development?  

I noted in this post, from more than four years ago, that the international remittances--and remittances from Keralites who work in other states in India--have not transformed Kerala into an economic powerhouse.  Instead, Kerala has become a money-order economy.  Kerala ranks high, even in the world, on various social development indicators, yes, but could that have been achieved without these international and domestic remittances?

While Sen gave credit to the numerous state-initiated welfare programmes, Bhagwati and Panagariya said that the state's achievement on both the counts was mostly due to the globalisation of the state's economy in the 1990s and the huge inflow of remittance from its large non-resident community.

So, what are the effects of remittances on economic development?  The Economist quotes from an IMF study:

decades of private income transfers—remittances—have contributed little to economic growth in remittance-receiving economies...the most persuasive evidence in support of this finding is the lack of a single example of a remittances success story: a country in which remittances-led growth contributed significantly to its development...no nation can credibly claim that remittances have funded or catalyzed significant economic development.

And notes:

The cash may flow back but the human capital has left. If those who emigrated were not working anyway then the flow of remittances will have a positive effect, but if they were already working in the home economy then the impact will be more nuanced. Inward flows of remittances may boost national income, but GDP measures the output of a country. The effect of remittances on GDP growth therefore depends upon how the money is spent by the recipients.

The export of human capital means that a Keralite scientist might have even worked for NASA and helped send Armstrong to the moon, and could have sent quite a few dollars back to Kerala.  And the leftist politics in the state has certainly achieved remarkable social indicators, largely thanks to the money from elsewhere. But, after all these decades, does the state have a robust domestic economy, or are the youth from god's own country doomed to emigrate in order earn their livelihood, even if means setting up a chai stall on the moon?

Get Lucky at a TexMex restaurant in India

It was about two decades ago, this time of the year, that we hosted the first of the few Swedish students.  She was a final year high school student, who was brave enough to experience the Bakersfield summer.  It was 110-degrees the afternoon that she landed, and when we brought her home, it turned out that the air conditioning system was dead!

She was a good sport, well-informed, and well-traveled.  When chatting with her, she talked about her interests in the kitchen, and I thought I might also plan the meals working in her preferences.  "What is your favorite that you like to make back home?" I asked her.

I was worried she might say "herring."  It was not herring and I was even more screwed.

"Tacos" she said.

Here was a teenage blonde from Sweden who loved making tacos back in her small town.  Twenty years ago!

It is a highly globalized culinary world in which we live.  Not my grandmothers' nothing-but-traditional food life.

I am always amazed and impressed with how much different foods have diffused throughout the world.  Yet, when the business thinker suggested that we go out to dinner, I didn't expect him to say "it's a TexMex place."

TexMex in India.  Go figure!

"It will be a good change from the Indian food you have been eating since you left Eugene" he added. True.  A good change.  But, really, TexMex in India?  Wow!

Given the city's nasty reputation for traffic, it was a smooth drive to Habanero.  We hadn't even entered the restaurant when I saw this:

O M G!
Live entertainment by a singer from Colombia!
In Bangalore.
In India!
The old country is not the old country I left behind, eh.

There she was singing with a Karaoke support, and occasionally tapping on the conga drums.  With a young crowd hooting and howling, and singing along sometimes.
A Colombian.
In Bangalore.

It was time to order.  I went with the vegetarian Mexican Taco Salad.

The Colombian kept singing.  There was not even one number that I didn't recognize, despite her best attempts to sing them all in a manner that made distinguishing one from the other quite a task.  A young crowd a couple of tables away continued with their hooting and howling.

The singer is the barely recognizable image in the dark in the middle

"She seems to be singing for you" joked my friend.

"If only she sang better" I replied.

"If she were better, then she won't be here" he said.

I suppose that is true about most of us in whatever we do.  If we were better, we might not be where we are.  Nor would we be where we are if we were any worse. To be happy in where we find ourselves is what most of the challenge in life seems to be about.

The food arrived.  It looked good.  Will it taste as good as it looked?

I took a bite.
And another.
And another.
Soon, it was all gone.
It was a pretty darn good vegetarian Mexican Taco Salad. In Bangalore. In India.

As if all that excitement weren't enough, the Colombian rendered her version of Get Lucky.  I asked the business thinker if he recognized the tune.  He did not.  The shock of a Colombian providing live entertainment at a TexMex place in Bangalore in India paled next to the shock of one not recognizing Get Lucky ;)   

Have we made this world a boring place?

The world was a mysterious place to me when I was a kid.  It was, after all, the prehistoric era--no television, no phones, and--most of all--no internet.

Those days, even a place that was a hundred kilometers away was a mystery.  America was somewhere out there.  And in that somewhere was my father's friend, who was a professor in a place called Pullman.

Once, he sent as gifts two sets of pencils.  One set had my name printed on each pencil, and the other set of pencils had my brother's name.  My brother and I thought it was the greatest gift ever.  The irony was that those pencils did not write well on the paper that we had in India, and we practically never used them.  But, we cherished them nonetheless.

The Pullman professor then topped that with a National Geographic gift subscription.  Glossy like I had never seen before.  Large sized maps.  Strange names of countries and peoples.  Stranger were the animals and birds.  And, hello, America was sending spacecrafts called Viking?
.
Against that kind of a backdrop from my much, much, younger days, there seems to be very little that is a mystery anymore.

Back then, we had to go different places in order to taste different foods.  Because, we did not know how to make rasgulla or the local market did not carry the ingredients or both.  It is a different world now.  We seem to get everything everywhere.  Even worse, increasingly every place looks and feels and sounds similar to every other place.  Commenting on the New Yorker's cover, the artist notes:

“I used to have to go to Rue des Rosiers to get a bagel—now you can get one anywhere in Paris,” says Charles Berberian, the Parisian cartoonist who painted this week’s cover, “Out and About.” Berberian’s image shows a couple at a café terrace in Brooklyn—or is it Paris?

The small town here in Oregon where my college campus is located has a bagel shop. Everything made right there.  And tastes pretty darn good too.  It's name?  "New York Bagel and Bistro."  There you have it--the confluence of NY and the French all in one shop name here in small town Oregon.

“New York has infiltrated Paris, and vice versa,” Berberian says. “The ambience in the street, the way people dress. The stores are the same now in Brooklyn and in my neighborhood, the 10th arrondissement. Ideas, trends are communicated instantly. Remember when you used to send packages by FedEx and had to wait two or three days?”

Everything is everywhere. And if not there at that very moment, can be had within a matter of hours.  Affluence has made life a tad boring.  Of course, I will take this affluence any day over the prehistoric era when ignorance was not bliss by any means ;)

Tamil Nadu fishermen in Iran? Complex maritime geopolitics!

A couple of days ago, I read this headline in The Hindu:

‘Ensure release of TN fishermen from Iran jail’

I am fairly familiar with the South Asian and Middle Eastern geography and, thus, was intrigued--after all, it is a long way from Tamil Nadu to Iran.

Consider the following map:

Tamil Nadu's coastline is way in the south, across from Sri Lanka.  If it were a news item about Tamil Nadu fishermen in Sri Lankan jail, I would have thought it is merely the latest of a long-running maritime issue between these two countries.  But, Iran?

There had to be more, and there was:

 The detained fishermen were the sole breadwinners of their families, and were engaged as contract labourers in fishing boats by a private company based in Saudi Arabia.
In the course of their work, they ventured into Iranian waters and were arrested. Without access to legal aid, they were tried and convicted by an Iranian court to undergo six months imprisonment and pay a fine of $ 5,750 each, she said.
“The fishermen continued to languish in jail, even after serving the term, for want of resources to pay the fine. They had not even been able to contact the Indian Embassy,” Ms.Jayalalithaa said.
The Embassy, she said, did not make effort either to establish contact with them or provide legal assistance.
It also did not put any pressure on the employer company to secure their release by settling the fine amount.

Of course, in many of these international incidents, there could be a lot more than what meets the eye.  But, it sounded rather odd that the Indian government and its embassy did not act in this context.  

I held back the first sentence in that report to highlight how bizarre this is--the sixteen fishermen were arrested back in December.  December!  More than seven months ago.  Which means that they have served out their sentence, but can't get out of the prison because they can't pay up?

I have been watching out for any update since then.  Nothing about the Indian government though.  But, there was this:

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa on Tuesday ordered of Rs 1 lakh financial assistance to each of the families of the 16 fishermen from the State who have been imprisoned in Iran. Announcing the aid, Jayalalithaa pointed out that she had urged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to take steps to help secure the release of the fishermen by paying the fine levied on them by the Iranian court.

One lakh rupees is about $1,700.  The fine amount is $5,750.  The diplomatic inaction is all the more intriguing.

Meanwhile, in Nagercoil, family members of the jailed fishermen hailed Jayalalithaa’s gesture.
“After hearing about my brother’s arrest our mother fell ill and now she is bedridden. The CM’s assistance will be a great relief for our family,” said Sahaya Rani, sister of jailed fishermen Jeya Seelan from Colachel.

It is not beyond anybody's imagination as to why Iran wouldn't have done anything otherwise.  In December, Iran was preparing for the elections that were held later in June.  Any out-of-the-ordinary foreign presence would have been suspicious.  More so when this is a story of Tamil fishermen under contract with a Saudi company.  Imagine Iranian navy personnel questioning the occupants of a ship flying with Saudi papers, when Iran and the Saudis have a history of bad blood between them.  And the people "spin" a story of how they are fishermen from Tamil Nadu; wouldn't you also throw them in jail under the suspicious circumstances?

If it were a bunch of IT professionals, then would the Indian government have let nearly eight months go by?  It is one heck of a crazy world in which we live!

Flag burning in India. Look, it is not the American flag! ... but Australia's?

Over the decades, we have gotten used to photographs of protesters around the world burning "Old Glory."  And, often enough, effigies of American presidents as well.

So much so that the only time photos of flags being burned get my attention is when it is not the American flag. Which is how this photo of the Australian flag being burnt makes it an interesting news.

No, the Australian government didn't launch any military operations to incur the wrath of these protesters.  And, no, it is not because of Oprah's gazillion dollar trip down under along with a planeload of adoring fans.

The Aussie flag was burnt because images representing the Hindu goddess of wealth, Lakshmi, were used on swimsuits by Australian designer Lisa Blue

Swift was the response:

A statement attributed to Lisa Blue Swimwear, headquartered in Byron Bay said: "We would like to offer an apology to anyone we may have offended and advise that the image of Goddess Lakshmi will not appear on any piece of Lisa Blue swimwear for the new season, with a halt put on all production of the new range and pieces shown on the runway from last week removed.

"This range will never be available for sale in any stockists or retail outlets anywhere in the world. We apologize to the Hindu community and take this matter very seriously".

(editor: ahem, by reproducing those images here, aren't you attracting criticism as well? 
If it does, it will be no different from the nasty comments that a couple of readers left in response to my post on Islam and modern art!)

This is, yet again, a reminder that religion is alive and well in the public spaces of the world.  I keep telling my students this, and I hope some actually pay attention--economic development correlated with a secular public space in the West, and we assumed it would be the same case everywhere.  But, it is increasingly turning out that economic development and globalization are actually strengthening religions and their institutions.  It is a completely different paradigm.

Here is Timothy Samuel Shah:

Modernization and globalization are bringing increasingly rapid social and moral change to people all over the world, especially those prosperous enough to consume satellite TV and the internet. Such innovations are widely welcomed, but they also help create a pervasive perception among modern publics that traditional ways of life are getting lost -- a perception the Pew Global Attitudes Project has identified in almost every society in the world.
One way some groups try to offset the perceived decline of tradition is to identify with religious revivalism. This dynamic is one factor behind the strong and consistent support for Hindu revivalism among large segments of India's urban middle class, as well as a similar pattern of urban middle-class support for Buddhist revivalism in Sri Lanka.
It is relevant to note here that combining advanced modernity and religiosity is hardly new: The U.S. is probably the most salient and longstanding case of a society that has consistently combined intense modernity with relatively high religiosity, private and public. As we discussed in the article, at least some evidence from both the Pew Research Center and the World Values Survey suggests that both private and public religiosity have, if anything, become more robust in the U.S. in recent years. Religion is showing signs of new private and public vitality in many places in the world, not just among people that are economically insecure and underdeveloped

Thus, the following BBC news doesn't surprise me at all:

The Allahabad High Court has issued notices to the Hindustan Times group for publishing the photos that show female models wearing the swimwear.

Oh well, I might as well end this post on a "cheeky" note :)