The rare success of a cult leader

In what feels like a million years ago, I blogged wondering whether we should think about the money that is donated as philanthropy.  Was the money earned through justifiable means?  Or, is it the case that most people simply do not care about the stink of the money.

In that post, I quoted the late Christopher Hitchens, who wrote about "Mother" Teresa, whom he referred to as MT:

MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan.

She was a friend of poverty.  I loved the way Hitchens phrased it.

Back then, there were two frequent commenters.  One was from the right side of the political spectrum here in the US, and another came from the right side of the political spectrum in the old country.  And, of course, true to their political ideology, they commented that money has no stink and that MT did nothing but good to the poor.

Ten days ago, Michelle Goldberg asked in her NY Times column if MT was "a cult leader."

I wonder if the right-wing commenters of the past read that column.  Perhaps not.

Goldberg writes about Mary Johnson, who spent 20 years in Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity:

“The Missionaries of Charity, very much, in so many ways, carried the characteristics of those groups that we easily recognize as cults,” Johnson told me. “But because it comes out of the Catholic Church and is so strongly identified with the Catholic Church, which on the whole is a religion and not a cult, people tend immediately to assume that ‘cult’ doesn’t apply here.”

Goldberg continues:

The former sisters describe an obsession with chastity so intense that any physical human contact or friendship was prohibited; according to Johnson, Mother Teresa even told them not to touch the babies they cared for more than necessary. They were expected to flog themselves regularly — a practice called “the discipline” — and were allowed to leave to visit their families only once every 10 years. 

A former Missionaries of Charity nun named Colette Livermore recalled being denied permission to visit her brother in the hospital, even though he was thought to be dying. “I wanted to go home, but you see, I had no money, and my hair was completely shaved — not that that would have stopped me. I didn’t have any regular clothes,” she said. “It’s just strange how completely cut off you are from your family.” Speaking of her experience, she used the term “brainwashing.”

Cult leaders maintain a tight grip over their flock.  It is difficult to flee from the leader.

Meanwhile, MT has been recognized by the Pope as as saint.

And you thought cult leaders always end up in trouble!

It was once a Third World Country posterchild

A few years ago, I met with an activist environmental lawyer from Bangladesh.  Syeda Rizwana Hasan was the first one from Bangladesh that I met since my graduate school days.

Always excited to meet with accomplished people from my old part of the world, I talked with her about her work.  And then I asked her a lot about Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

In 1970, when Bangladesh was still East Pakistan, "Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, won a landslide victory in national elections. The Pakistani leadership was reluctant to accept the results because it did not want an East Pakistani political party heading the federal government."

West Pakistan, now Pakistan, was the center of all the economic, commercial, and military power. The West Pakistan government and its people couldn't care about the Bengali-speaking fellow-citizens who were thousands of miles away, separated by India.  The last thing they wanted to grant was autonomy to the Bengali-speaking Pakistanis.

As the demand for Bengali autonomy grew, the Pakistani government launched Operation Searchlight,“ a military operation to crush the emerging movement. According to journalist Robert Payne, it killed at least 7,000 Bengali civilians – both Hindus and Muslims – in a single night.

On March 26, Bangladesh was declared independent and the liberation war began.

The US, mad with its supremacy and in a Cold War against the USSR, sided with West Pakistan's leaders and military.  As we review history, I wonder how many times we ever sided with the good guys!

When refugees started spilling over to India in the millions, India's prime minister, Indira Gandhi, decided to employ the military against the West Pakistani forces in East Pakistan.  In less than two weeks, the West Pakistani forces surrendered.  India's military chief, S.H.F.J. Manekshaw, became a household name.  We kids thought he was the greatest ever!

In no time at all, the Nixonian realpolitik Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, labeled Bangladesh as a "basket case."

Nick Kristof writes about how much Bangladesh has developed over the 50 years, and how we in the US can learn from it.

Life expectancy in Bangladesh is 72 years. That’s longer than in quite a few places in the United States, including in 10 counties in Mississippi. Bangladesh may have once epitomized hopelessness, but it now has much to teach the world about how to engineer progress.

Kristof continues:

Bangladesh invested in its most underutilized assets — its poor, with a focus on the most marginalized and least productive, because that’s where the highest returns would be. And the same could be true in America. We’re not going to squeeze much more productivity out of our billionaires, but we as a country will benefit hugely if we can help the one in seven American children who don’t even graduate from high school.

That’s what Biden’s attack on child poverty may be able to do, and why its central element, a refundable child tax credit, should be made permanent. Bangladesh reminds us that investing in marginalized children isn’t just about compassion, but about helping a nation soar.

I wonder what Kissinger has to say about Bangladesh now.  But then, who cares for Kissinger, right?

With women like Syeda Rizwana Hasan, Bangladesh is now well on its way to even surge past India.

Well, it has.

A few months ago, the IMF reported that Bangladesh had moved ahead of India in terms of per capita income.  Boy did that cause quite some issues for the Modi-toadies who believe in the superiority of Hindus!

We all can learn a lot from the 50-year old Bangladesh success story.

Sweet home, Alabama?

In my initial few days after getting to Los Angeles, I thought everything looked fantastic, like how a rich country should. 

It didn't take me much to understand that I was using the old country as a frame of reference. 

After that red-pill experience happened, I could see problems everywhere.  Like how the one grocery store in the area was always crowded and it stank.  Or how apartment buildings were secured behind electric gates and intercoms.  How the sidewalks were not all even, and how sometimes there were no sidewalks.

Halfway through graduate school, a friend told me about a room that was vacant in his apartment complex.  A single unit, with a shared laundry in the building.  The rent that he quoted was phenomenally low.  I rushed there and signed the lease.

It was inexpensive for a reason.  For plenty of reasons, actually.  The water in the faucet ran brown sometimes.  The neighborhood, it turned out, had a drug business problem.

The nearly two years there was my only ever experience to have lived in near-poverty conditions.

I was now increasingly convinced that there was something seriously wrong with the image of America as a rich country.

Close to graduation, I went to New Orleans for a conference.  I wandered through without a map and accidentally ended up in neighborhoods that looked run down and anything unlike a rich landscape.  I worried about the country that I knew would be home to me.

A decade later, when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, and when a good chunk of the country and the world woke up to the reality, I was relieved that finally a lot more people were seeing the city that I had walked about.

I have often told students that my travels provide me a wonderful reality check---going to economically depressed areas in the US or in the rest of the world gives me a clear idea of the luxurious life that I lead, and going to affluent neighborhoods in affluent cities reminds me that I am nowhere near the upper echelons.

Often, even without traveling, I get my lessons.  Like when I read this essay in The New Yorker.  It is brutal depiction of the gross economic (and racial) injustice in a rich country.  An injustice when a community lacks a sewage treatment process, and when crap literally floods people's yards.  A sewage scene that the UN rapporteur said "was unlike anything else he had encountered in the developed world."

This was not in New Orleans though.  It was in Alabama.  It was in "one of the poorest counties in one of America’s poorest states."

I have seen enough, read enough, and watched enough to know that it is way past time that we addressed the economic and social injustice in my adopted home.  I hope that the new administration will be laser focused on these.

Eat more fruits!

I was hungry for a snack earlier this afternoon.  I walked into the kitchen.  I knew exactly what I was going to eat.

I sliced three tomatoes, sprinkled a little bit of salt and a tiny bit of sugar on the slices.  I enjoyed those tomatoes.

It is a contrast to the experience that a former student related to me years ago.  Patrick was a big guy, with roots in California.  He came by my office once in a while just to chat, mostly about San Diego. 

In one of those chats, Patrick recalled the family's poverty when he was young.  His mother, with barely any money to feed her kids, often bought macaroni and cheese packets that were on sale.  The kids ate a lot of them.  Those empty calories made them big--but unhealthy. So, there he was as a young man, but with plenty of health issues.

Increasingly, the paradox is that poorer people tend to be more obese than rich people are.  It is not merely an American experience; The Economist reports about such a situation in the UK:

Poor children have been fatter than rich ones since around the 1980s. But over the past decade the rich have started to slim down, as the poor have got bigger.

A paradox, yes.

It is not difficult to understand some of the reasons, like this:

People have a limited amount of mental capacity to think about their problems, argues Hugo Harper of the Behavioural Insights Team, a part-publicly owned think-tank which co-authored a recent report on the subject with Guy’s and St Thomas’ Charity. Parents concerned about paying rent and keeping the electricity on are thus less likely to think about cooking a healthy dinner.

Yep, that was my student's story as well--his mother was more worried about making sure they did not become homeless, and less concerned about healthy food.

So, what can be done?

But the underlying causes of childhood obesity are fiendishly tricky to fix. As Sir Michael Marmot, head of University College London’s Institute of Health Equity, puts it: “If you want to solve the obesity problem, you have to solve the inequality problem first.”

It might seem strange, but it is true that one can get fast-food that is less expensive than apples and oranges.

All these remind me of the poem that I learnt during the Tanzania trip:

Source

Worse since the British Raj!

I usually stay away from blogging about the old country for a simple reason: I have long give up on India.

I know, it pains me to write that, and to say that I have given up on India.  But, the nature of my profession and my personality means that I end up saying and writing unpleasant assessments of life.

But, every once in a while, I read something so egregious that preoccupies me to an extent that only blogging can relieve me of the discomfort about the old country.  Such was the case when I read this about India's crony capitalism.

In the India that I grew up, society was "marked by divisions of caste, race and religion."  Such a stratification was not anything new:

Prior to the country winning independence in 1947, its people were subjugated by imperial British administrators and myriad maharajas, and the feudal regional monarchies over which they presided.

If there were a few good things in India's Nehruvian economic policies, it was that the affluent were held under check.

Even afterwards, India remained a grimly poor country, as its socialist leadership fashioned a notably inefficient state-planned economic model, closed off almost entirely from global trade. Over time, India grew more equal, if only in the limited sense that its elite remained poor by the standards of the industrialised west.

Not anymore. Over the past two decades of liberalization, "India has created a model of development in which the proceeds of growth flow unusually quickly to the very top."  Economic inequality now is worse than what it was even under the bastard Raj!

Even a casual visitor to India will find it hard not to notice the highly unequal society that the country is.  But, "perhaps because Indian society has long been deeply stratified, this dramatic increase in inequality has not received as much global attention as it deserves."  You know, that's how India has always been, so why bother!

There is every reason to believe that on its current course, the country’s the gap between rich and poor will widen, too. Perversely, the closer India comes to its achieving its ambitions of Chinese-style double-digit levels of economic growth, the faster this will happen. On most measures, it should already be ranked alongside South Africa and Brazil as one of the world’s least-equal countries. Even more importantly, poor countries that start off with high levels of inequality often struggle to reverse that trend as they grow richer.

While there are plenty of disagreements on the implications of inequality, I think there will be an universal agreement on this:

India’s greatest curse is inequality of opportunity. People with skills and access to global markets have benefited hugely, while those in rural areas without skills or connectivity have lagged far behind.

If victory can come from pointing to even worse conditions, then India can rejoice that it is not anymore the country with the largest population of extremely poor, who live on less than $2 a day; Nigeria is the new king! But, this is not the World Cup!

For many in India, such talk is sure to provoke sharp debate. Tens of millions of people remain destitute and thousands of farmers commit suicide each year. Nearly 40 percent of Indian children under 5 are short for their age, a sign of chronic undernutrition.
“The claims that India is on the verge of winning the battle against extreme poverty sit uneasily with the current concerns about job creation or rural distress,” said an editorial last week in Mint, a financial newspaper in India.

India is at yet another important crossroad

India is set to grow in economic might throughout this century, as America did during the 19th. By some accounts, it has already overtaken China as the world’s most populous nation; in others, the baton will pass during the next decade or two. Whatever the case, the fate of a large slice of humanity depends on India getting its economic model right. Meanwhile, as democracy falters in the west, so its future in India has never been more critical. To make this transition, India’s billionaire Raj must become a passing phase, not a permanent condition. India’s ambition to lead the second half of the “Asian century” – and the world’s hopes for a fairer and more democratic future – depend on getting this transition right.

But, I am not holding my breath; I gave up on the old country a while ago! :(

93 percent of the population cannot afford food

No, not in some sub-Saharan African country.

It is not in India.

It is in Venezuela!

Venezuela was once the richest country in South America, but food prices have skyrocketed in recent years, forcing many to scavenge for things to eat.

We humans are remarkably creative on the destruction that we can bring about :(

Everything was going well.  So well that a horrible human being--no, not this guy--stepped up to ruin it all.

Elected in 1998, President Hugo Chávez became widely popular for his promise to share the country’s oil wealth with the poor and to guarantee food security. To fund his “21st Century Socialism” agenda, he relied on oil revenues, which accounted for 93 percent of exports in 2008.

In one decade, chávez turned that country around, yes.  But, heading in the wrong direction.

During the oil price boom, the percentage of households in poverty fell to 29 percent from 53 percent. The government has not released poverty data since 2015. But a survey by three of the top universities in the country indicates that in recent years the government underestimated the level of poverty, which reached 82 percent in 2016.

"Put simply, many Venezuelans are starving to death. And their government often can’t or won’t do anything to help."

Two years ago to this date, the madman announced his candidacy for the presidency, and since then we have not been able to focus on serious issues like Venezuela.  What a tragedy!

More on that damn foreign aid

Remember this post on how the foreign aid that the US gives is sinking it deeper and deeper into the gazillion dollar debt?

Go ahead, take a minute to read that and come back.

You ready for me?

The United Kingdom’s largest-circulation Sunday newspaper recently launched a petition calling for an end to ring-fenced aid spending (worth 0.7% of national income). Prior to his election victory, US President Donald Trump railed against “sending foreign aid to countries that hate us,” reflecting a widespread belief that aid needs to be cut. The United States allocates less than 1% of the federal budget to aid, but the average American believes this figure to be thirty-one-times higher.

Yes, welcome to the brave new world of alternative facts and all-about-me-who-cares-about-the-rest.

The other day, in class, students were clearly appalled at the fact that a billion people in this world do not even have access to electricity.  Mere access.  Without access, there is no question of consumption of electricity.  Students were at a loss understanding why developed countries were not helping out.  I didn't tell them though at the miserly amount we give as foreign aid; why completely discourage those young students, right?

Ah yes, let those poor people eat cakes in the dark!

But,enough with the doom and gloom.  (Flynn resigning, and the FBI continuing to investigate him, has boosted my morale!)

Let us look at something positive then:

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation spends more each year on development aid than most rich governments do.

Re-read that sentence.  Go ahead.  And be impressed.

Against the backdrop of the pathological presidency of Trump's, which wants to reduce funding for organizations that educate girls and women about family planning, I want to highlight the following from the Gates Foundation:

For the first time in history, more than 300 million women in developing countries are using modern methods of contraception. It took decades to reach 200 million women. It has taken only another 13 years to reach 300 million—and the impact in saving lives is fantastic.

Why is this a big deal?

When women in developing countries space their births by at least three years, their babies are almost twice as likely to reach their first birthday. Over time, the ability of women to use contraceptives and space their pregnancies will become one of the largest contributors in cutting childhood deaths.

If only the asshole president and his asshole minions will listen to Bill Gates, Melinda Gates, and Warren Buffett!  There is a lot more to life than to be obsessed with fertilized eggs!

Contraceptives are also one of the greatest antipoverty innovations in history. When women are able to time and space their pregnancies, they are more likely to advance their education and earn an income—and they’re more likely to have healthy children.

Join me in yelling a yuge "fuck you" to trump and his minions, and an even bigly and yuger yell to say "thank you" to Bill Gates, Melinda Gates, and Warren Buffett.

Instant gratification is expensive

When my parents sat down and updated the family's cash flow accounts, which they did every few days, we kids were assigned tasks as well--from recalling the expenses to adding up the rupees and paise.  Thus, I grew up with no illusions of money stashed somewhere.  Knowing how my parents were cautious about every paisa, I knew that I had to be reasonable with my wishes.  I had to find happiness within those constraints, even though once in a while I did wonder what it would be like to travel to Delhi and Kashmir.

Even now, my parents sit down and do their accounting.  They no longer worry about the missing ten paisa though, unlike the old days.  It is not because they have lost any respect for the paisa, but I think it is because they are too old and tired to worry about the missing paisa.

In this age of instant gratification, I assume that most people do not think much about where their money comes from.  Further, when kids see parents using a small plastic card that gets them everything, I wonder how they might even learn about the age old idea of living within one's means.

At some point, the spending catches up with the reality.

Overall, U.S. households have $12.3 trillion in debt, according to another New York Fed report, released this week.

People who are worried about the federal debt, which is currently at $14 trillion (or $19 trillion, in another accounting) ought to be way more worried about the level of household debt.

When the accounting is done the honest way that my parents did, then it turns out that "one in seven Americans ends up in the red":

Even people with good jobs can owe so much on credit cards, student loans, or mortgages that, on paper, they’re worth less than zero.

In the old days, there was no concept of credit cards or mortgages.  Credit, in instant gratification, is perhaps like drugs to addicts.

We might be tempted to conclude that people like me, who have taken on too much of a mortgage loan, are the problem.  Nope.

Mortgages are a minor factor, the New York Fed found. Only 19 percent of people with negative net worth are homeowners, compared with 75 percent of those with positive net worth.

We might also be tempted to think that it is largely the uneducated who can't seem to understand cash flow.  Nope.

People with negative worth are a diverse group that defies stereotypes of the poor. One in eight has a graduate degree, and 43 percent have a college degree, only a few points lower than those with positive wealth.

Last June, one of the students I worked with graduated--with zero debt.  I strongly urged her, more than once, to write a commentary in the newspaper about how she achieved that.  She didn't buy fancy clothes, didn't own a car, didn't care to party hard, bought secondhand clothes, didn't travel abroad, focused on her school work, worked part-time, applied for scholarships, and yet had loads of fun and was my partner-in-crime with horrible groaners.  But then she, too, didn't listen to me--she didn't want to write about these.

I suppose it is not fashionable these days to live modest lives within one's means. Maybe I should go to the store and buy myself the latest gizmo and charge it to my card!  Nah; after all, I am Major Buzzkill ;)

Race in America

In making the transition from electrical engineering, I spent quite some months thinking about what exactly it was that I wanted to study in graduate school, which would define the rest of my life. Which is how I finally settled on urban planning programs--cities were the physical settings where all the issues that interested me, worried me, came together.

In one of the courses in my first year, the assigned readings included a lengthy essay on the "underclass" here in America.  To quite some extent, that essay was also how I first came to know about a literary world in America that was immensely more than the Time and Newsweek and Readers Digest, which were the only ones that I had seen and read in India.

I was reminded of that essay when reading this book-review article in the New Yorker.  Yet again I am left wondering why a book-review essay in the New Yorker is so much more enjoyable to read, while book-reviews in academic publications are incredibly boring and painful!

The essay from the graduate school days introduced me to the spatial aspects of injustice here in America.  The setting of the university where I was a student further drove home the reality that America was a land of milk and honey, but not to everybody.  The university was surrounded by visible signs of poverty, in which the people's skins were in various shades of brown--to the south, it was a dark brown that we refer to as black, and to the north and east was the lighter brown of the Hispanics.

The New Yorker notes:

By some estimates, African-Americans are more isolated now than they were half a century ago. 

The President and his wife are more the exception than the norm.

The essay is about gentrification, which here in America is closely correlated with race issues as well.

The story of gentrification was, curiously, the story of neighborhoods destroyed by desirability. As the term spread through academic journals and then the popular press, “gentrification,” like “ghetto,” became harder to define. At first, it referred to instances of new arrivals who were buying up (and bidding up) old housing stock, but then there was “new-build gentrification.” Especially in America, gentrification often suggested white arrivals who were displacing nonwhite residents and taking over a ghetto

However, there is also a distinct pattern about where the gentrification happens:

A recent study found that Chicago neighborhoods that were forty per cent or more African-American were the least likely to experience gentrification. This statistic was cited by the journalist Natalie Y. Moore in her new book about her city, “The South Side.” She recounts the pride she felt when she bought a condo in a seemingly up-and-coming South Side neighborhood: she paid a hundred and seventy-two thousand dollars, and she was shocked when, five years later, an assessor told her that its value had depreciated to fifty-five thousand. She writes about herself as a “so-called gentrifier,” adding, ruefully, that “black Chicago neighborhoods don’t gentrify.”

Gentrification bypasses neighborhoods that are "too black"?

The more things change, the more they stay the same :(

The poor will always be with us?

Soon after the fall of the Soviet system, in an issue devoted to poverty, The Economist included a lengthy essay with a title that was something like "the poor will always be with us."  Only when reading that piece did I know that the magazine newspaper was playing on a verse from the Bible.

Over the years, we have certainly seen a dramatic reduction in the number of poor around the world, and the percentages now are nothing compared to decades past.  But, we still have the poor, especially in rich countries.  When we overlay on this the issues of income inequality and the implications of the digital revolution, is there anything else that we can do?

Why not simply give everybody money and take care of poverty?

Figure out a reasonable amount — the official poverty line amounts to about $25,000 for a family of four; a full-time job at $15 an hour would provide about $30,000 a year — and hand every adult a monthly check. The minimum-wage worker stretching to make it to payday, the single mother balancing child care and a job — everybody would get the same thing.
Poverty would be over, at a stroke.
Being universal — that is, for the homeless and the masters of the universe alike — the program would be free of the cumbersome assessments required to determine eligibility. It would also escape the stigma typically attached to programs for the poor.

That is the very idea of Basic Income.  

In my classes, I present students with a thought experiment.  The digital technology is getting better by the minute and software and physical robots are making the economy highly productive. At the same time, quite a few, whose jobs have been eliminated thanks to the "digital workers" are earning little even  when working a lot.  So, in the near future, if the "digital workers" are productive enough and all it takes is a little bit of taxes on the rich to guarantee everybody a basic income, will the students support such an idea?

Switzerland put that to test, via a referendum:

Final results from Sunday's referendum showed that nearly 77% opposed the plan, with only 23% backing it.

Among those who opposed it, there was a worry that the open borders would immediately attract quite a few:

Luzi Stamm, a member of parliament for the right-wing Swiss People's Party, opposed the idea.
"Theoretically, if Switzerland were an island, the answer is yes. But with open borders, it's a total impossibility, especially for Switzerland, with a high living standard," he said.
"If you would offer every individual a Swiss amount of money, you would have billions of people who would try to move into Switzerland."

This is only the beginning.

Finland is gearing up to launch a large-scale trial next year, and a more limited effort is current underway in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Y Combinator, the US-based investment company, is doing a pilot in Oakland, California. The government of Ontario, Canada, is launching a test this year, and GiveDirectly, a cash transfer charity, is doing a test in Kenya.

Do not hastily conclude that it is only the knee-jerk liberals who support the idea.

Some thinkers on the right, too, have managed to overcome their general distaste for government welfare to support the idea. This month, Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute will publish an updated version of his plan to replace welfare as we know it with a dollop of $10,000 in after-tax income for every American above the age of 21.

We need to continue to think about these, and more, because we need to design a new social contract for the twenty-first century, in order to replace the highly frayed safety nets from the previous era.

You will always have the poor among you?

Remember those guilt-tripping commercials in which Sally Struthers hugged poor kids and asked us to open up our hearts and our wallets?  Which then provided enough materials for comedians, like in this one?  The world is keen on putting all of them out of business, it seems!  Consider this:

The number of extremely poor people (defined as those earning less than $1 or $1.25 a day, depending on who’s counting) rose inexorably until the middle of the 20th century, then roughly stabilized for a few decades. Since the 1990s, the number of poor has plummeted.
In 1990, more than 12 million children died before the age of 5; this toll has since dropped by more than half.
More kids than ever are becoming educated, especially girls. In the 1980s, only half of girls in developing countries completed elementary school; now, 80 percent do.

Global poverty is in decline.  A huge decline.  How huge, you ask?

On Sunday, the World Bank announced that this year, for the first time on record, the percentage of the earth’s population that is living in extreme poverty is likely to fall below ten per cent. As recently as 1990, the proportion was more than a third. 

You want details, right?

In 1990, 60.8 per cent of the population in the East Asia and Pacific region, which includes China, lived below the extreme poverty line. By 2012, that figure had fallen to 7.2 per cent, and this year it will be 4.1 per cent, according to the bank’s projections. For the South Asia region, which includes India, the trend is similar, if a bit less dramatic. In 1990, 50.6 per cent of the population lived in extreme poverty; by 2012 the figure had fallen to 18.8 per cent, and this year it will be 13.5 per cent.

You perhaps noticed that it was the data for "extreme poverty" and you think that there is now a huge increase in moderate poverty.  It is not an increase, but, yes, there is moderate poverty,:

In the poorest forty per cent of countries, according to the bank’s own figures, about half the population is still in “moderate poverty,” which it defines as existing on less than four dollars a day of income.

Poverty reduction is a huge story that should be in the front pages of every newspaper, and should be the lead story of every television news program.  But, of course, who cares about the good news when it is bad news and sex that sell!

While we celebrate it, the new global economy raises new problems:

in many developed countries the poor and near-poor are actually falling further behind. One way to see this is to look at how households in the bottom forty per cent of the income distribution are doing. When the bank’s researchers did this, they found that in seventeen of thirty-six advanced countries, per-capita income in such households has fallen since 1990.
That figure doesn’t easily jibe with the upbeat story of mutually reinforcing prosperity that trade economists used to tell. It reflects the reality of a world transformed, with globalization creating winners and losers in a manner that defies easy description. Globalization reduces some inequities, such as the scourge of extreme poverty, while accentuating others, and everywhere it causes political tensions.

The problem in dealing with all those trends is this: it takes responsible political leaders to understand such trends and then to exercise leadership in order to create a new social contract that will reflect the changing fortunes.  It will take an informed and interested electorate to think about such trends and to elect responsible and thoughtful leaders. The Economist notes about a golden era of policymaking, though it was in a completely different context of foreign policy:

What did it take to make the country act in such enlightened self-interest? According to “The Wise Men”, a history by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas published in 1986, the magic ingredients included a rarefied East Coast foreign-policy elite who could easily glide between Wall Street and high office; responsible media; a thoughtful Congress capable of bipartisanship; a public that could be united against a common ideological enemy with which America had few economic links; and a president, Harry Truman, who was a war hero.

"enlightened self-interest" seems so impossible now!

Neither god nor capitalism works in mysterious ways!

The hippie, er, Pope, is on a tear talking up the environment and criticizing capitalism, which will certainly make the right-wing Catholics wonder if Francis is some kind of a Manchurian Candidate ;)  One of the problems I have with the faith-based people, which includes not only the religious but also those who make religions of their favorite causes, is that they often tend to obfuscate facts or even try to hide them.  Ricardo Hausman goes after the Pope with facts.  But, first, what was the Holy See's problem with capitalism?

Pope Francis said in a recent speech in Bolivia: “This system is by now intolerable: farm workers find it intolerable, laborers find it intolerable, communities find it intolerable, peoples find it intolerable. The earth itself – our sister, Mother Earth, as Saint Francis would say – also finds it intolerable.”

Typically, this is what happens when preaching to the choir--there is no dissent. The audience, in fact, leaves even more strengthened in their "faith," which in this case is that all the problems of this world can be attributed to capitalism.

Except for an inconvenient truth--our lives have become way more tolerable than conditions have ever been only thanks to capitalism.  If the Industrial Revolution marks as an easy to reference starting point for the economic system that we now practice, all one has to do is think about life as it was prior to that time period.  How many among us would want to live in the conditions that existed, say, 300 years ago?  (The Pope would, I am sure, because the Vatican was immensely more powerful and influential back then!)

Hausman writes:

In poverty-stricken Bolivia, Francis criticized “the mentality of profit at any price, with no concern for social exclusion or the destruction of nature,” along with “a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system.”...
Francis is right to focus attention on the plight of the world’s poorest. Their misery, however, is not the consequence of unbridled capitalism, but of a capitalism that has been bridled in just the wrong way. 

I am no rah-rah fan of capitalism, as the regular readers know all too well.  But then there is no way I will engage in a rhetorical wholesale condemnation either.  Because, there are far too many nuances to think about.  Consider one of the many sweeping accusations of "profit at any price."  Of course, there are atrocious practices like pollution or ill-treatment of the workers, primarily thanks to how those with money are able to rope the government in and get away with such crimes.  But, there is also the other side of the same system that encourages investments even when they do not generate big time profits at all.

You are perhaps thinking that it is so un-capitalistic for the system to voluntarily support when we think it is always "profit at any price."  James Surowiecki writes about " two common but ultimately questionable assumptions":

 The first is that corporate decision-makers care only about the short term. The second is that it’s the stock market that makes them think this way.

Quick. Can you think about capitalistic behavior that has resulted in strong support for companies that don't seem to generate profits?  Stumped?

Of course, there’s no shortage of investors who are myopic. But the market, for the most part, isn’t. That’s why companies like Amazon and Tesla and Netflix, whose profits in the present have typically been a tiny fraction of their market caps, have been able to command colossal valuations. It’s why there’s a steady flow of I.P.O.s for companies with small revenues and nonexistent earnings. And it’s why the biotech industry is now valued at more than a trillion dollars, even though many of the firms have yet to bring a single drug to market. None of these things are what you’d expect from a market dominated by short-term considerations.

Back when the Pope ruled the world, freedom was not known to most of the world, except for a tiny few who were the rich and the powerful.  It was a world of slavery and diseases and tortures and short-lives and poverty and starvation.  We have a lot more to do in order to address diseases and poverty and starvation and many more human sufferings.  But, no soaring rhetoric condemning capitalism will deliver any miracles, even if the faithful blindly believe in the power of miracles.

Source

Heat doesn’t kill people ... poverty does

The following is an op-ed essay that I emailed the newspaper editor a while ago as the old country was getting set for the monsoon after yet another intense summer.  But, the essay hasn't made it to print, for whatever reason.  So, hey, as the editor/publisher of this blog, I can always "publish" that here ;)
*************

If there were a weather lobby that is the equivalent of the National Rifle Association, then the argument might be “heat doesn’t kill people, but poverty does.”

The monsoon season has set in the Indian Subcontinent and, as always, the summer that preceded it was intense, hot, and deadly. In India, where large areas of the country experienced triple-digit temperatures, with a high of 117 degrees in a couple of places, more than 2,000 died during the nasty heat wave. Pakistan, which has a much smaller population than India’s, registered nearly 1,300 deaths, most of them in the city of Karachi.

For those of us here in the gorgeous and temperate Pacific Northwest, even 90-plus degree days are insufferable. But, we are well aware that in the United States too there are a number of regions and cities that routinely experience triple-digit summer temperatures for weeks. In Las Vegas, for instance, it is a rare day in July that the daytime high stays below 100 and nighttime lows seldom fall below 85. Summers in Texas and Oklahoma are legendary.

We don’t always pause to wonder why people don’t die in huge numbers when Vegas broils, while people seem to drop dead in Karachi’s heat.

One might also wonder why India’s neighbor, Bangladesh, did not suffer comparable deaths during the summer. For one, the high temperature on a typical summer day in Bangladesh might only be in the high 90s. But, more importantly, Bangladesh has invested a lot more into human development than even India. This is evident in one of the most important measures of human existence: life expectancy at birth in Bangladesh is 71 years, compared to 66 in India.

India, with 1.25 billion people is a lot bigger than Bangladesh that has only 156 million. Aggregating the billion-plus into one huge country masks the differences that exist within, and hides away the acute poverty that is sometimes even worse than the conditions in Sub-Saharan Africa. Even within India, there are plenty of places where the summer heat seems like a killer but doesn’t really kill—because those places have remarkably lower poverty rates. In the city of Chennai, where my parents live, my father complains that the hot days of summer that began in mid-April do not seem to be ending anytime soon. But, the city and the state in which it is located—Tamil Nadu—have much better Human Development Indicators than most of the rest of India and, thus, the heat doesn’t kill people.

The poorest of the poor in countries like India or Pakistan do not find it easy to escape from the heat, especially if they are sidewalk dwellers. Access to potable water can be a challenge, particularly in rural areas where water supplies might be limited and which only the monsoon will replenish. It was a double-whammy this summer in Karachi—Ramadan coincided with the heatwave. Even if a thirsty urban poor was ready to pay top rupees for a glass of water, commercial food and drink establishments were closed in order to comply with the religious and government rules on respecting the Ramadan fasting during the day. It is, after all, the poor who are out and about in the heat, which is why we do not read about the business and political leaders of Pakistan succumbing to the heat.

Fasting during Ramadan is, of course, the practice in Saudi Arabia or Iran. Summers in those countries are brutal as well. Yet, reports of heat-wave deaths from those countries do not make the news, not because of any censorship but because there are no such happenings in large numbers. The acute poverty that one finds in some parts of India or Pakistan is not to be found in Iran. Simply put, it is poverty that kills!

The worst of the heat and dust of the Subcontinent has yielded to the monsoons. Again, it is typically the poorest whose lives will be severely affected when the rains come down in a hurry. To complicate things, experts predict that extreme heat and flooding will be even more worrisome with global climate change.

If there is any good news here, it is that the poverty rate has been significantly reduced over the past couple of decades. Along with that, with governments investing in people—via schools, health programs, water supply and sanitation, for instance—the human condition has been improving as well. The more such positive changes happen, the lower are the chances of thousands dying from the heat-waves. Now, if only those changes can happen as rapidly as ice cubes melting in the Karachi summer!

At least influenza is seasonal. Affluenza makes life meaningless?

"My aunt died of influenza" begins Eliza Doolittle, remember?

At least that is an illness that we can hope to fight against by taking preventive flu shots, or by resting and taking care when sick.

But, how do you deal with a problem like affluenza?

When we did not have much, we made do with what we had.  As we begin to live the life of affluence (if you are reading this, face it, you are affluent!) there is always a chance that we will be on the path towards being infected with affluenza, for which there is only one cure, which is within ourselves.

A few years ago, well, nearly two decades ago, the visiting Swedish high school student we were hosting talked about depression among the youth in her country.   She thought out her reason for that, which was along the lines of "we have everything we want. So, the teenagers invent problems and cut their wrists."

I often remind students when we discuss poverty that the economic deprivation does not equate to despair and depression and all those negative associations.  There is, of course, a good chance that we are happy when we do not have to worry about where the next meal will come from, or to worry about shelter. That basic, fundamental, material needs, the lack of which can easily make one unhappy.  But, once we look beyond those basic aspects, and as we move along in the affluence continuum, do we find our lives to be meaningful?

Do the poor have more meaningful lives?

Thousands of people, completing an annual Gallup survey administered in a hundred and thirty-two countries, reported how happy they were, whether their lives had “an important purpose or meaning,” and where their lives stood on a scale from zero (worst possible life) to ten (best possible life).
The first result replicated plenty of earlier research: people from wealthier countries were generally happier than those from poorer countries. To reach an average life-satisfaction score of four out of ten, people needed to earn about seven hundred dollars a year; for a score of five, they needed to earn an average of three thousand dollars per year; for a score of six, they needed to earn an average of sixteen thousand dollars per year; and to score seven they needed to earn an average of sixty-four thousand dollars a year.
But, if wealth fostered happiness, it appeared to drain meaningfulness. Between ninety-five and a hundred per cent of the respondents from poverty-stricken Sierra Leone, Togo, Kyrgyzstan, Chad, and Ethiopia reported leading meaningful lives. Only two-thirds of the respondents in Japan, France, and Spain believed their lives had meaning.

A typical Ethiopian or a Bangladeshi finds life to be a lot more meaningful than does a typical American or Swede.  Not difficult to guess that there is practically no affluenza in Ethiopia or Bangladesh!  How does this work?

Happiness was generally a reflection of how they felt in the present alone. Happier people were more likely to report leading easy lives, to be in good health, to feel good much of the time, and to be able to buy what they needed without financial strain. People who felt their lives were meaningful, on the other hand, were likelier to have experienced fulfilling social relationships, engaged in acts of charity, taken care of their children, thought about struggles and challenges, and prayed, among other activities. These characteristics sound a lot like the social ties and religious beliefs that gave poorer people a sense of purpose in Oishi and Diener’s paper. Perhaps because poverty strips people of happiness in the short term, it forces them to take the long view—to focus on the relationships they have with their children, their gods, and their friends, which become more meaningful over time.

I am not sure I agree with the possible corollary that there is a tradeoff involved between the short-term material needs happiness and meaningfulness over the horizon. But, perhaps I feel the lack of the tradeoff because of the intensely introspective and reflective and autoethnographic life that I lead?  I suppose it is quite possible that those caught up in the short-term "rat race to richness" might feel that emptiness about what life is all about?

“On Wall Street, hard work is always overwork.” Grinding out hundred-hour weeks for years helps bankers think of themselves as tougher and more dedicated than everyone else. And working fifteen hours a day doesn’t just demonstrate your commitment to a company; it also reinforces that commitment. Over time, the simple fact that you work so much becomes proof that the job is worthwhile, and being in the office day and night becomes a kind of permanent initiation ritual. 

The more we stand and stare the more meaning we find in life?  I am convinced about that.

Have I convinced you?  Are you sufficiently inoculated against affluenza?

A dude with a hoodie on, on a hammock, by the river, basking in the sunlight

Give a man free fish ... soon he will be bored and will choose to pay for them!

With the exception of people like my super-wealthy gazillionaire friend (haha!) or people like me who, according to my neighbor, never works for a living, most dread the weekdays and look forward to weekends and holidays.

We are a strange species.  We bring all the trouble of work on ourselves and then dream about not having to work.  We chain ourselves, put a lock on it and throw the key away, and then dream of being free at least every two days of the week.

Some of the most free people that I have met in my life were in the villages like Pattamadai and Sengottai.  Seemingly in sync with the hot temperature conditions, where even a brisk walk can tire a person, there was a whole lot of doing nothing.  We folks from urban and industrial areas, having been used to working in order to earn the privilege of sitting around twice a week, found that kind of a rustic life to be dull and boring and even labeled them as lazy for not doing anything.

The older I get, the less clear I am on who is really free.

We dream of a future, made possible by science and technology, when we won't have to work at all.  Robots that clean the homes. Ready-to-consume nutritious food in full and plenty (even if it will be in unrecognizable forms to us in the present.)  A future in which even firefighters won't have any work because nothing synthetic will ever crash or burn thanks to advancements in science and technology.   In that future, we will have all the free time in the world.  Or, at least, more weekends than weekdays.

When students complain about income inequality and unemployment--about which I have been worried for a long time, evidenced by the number of blog posts on those issues--sometimes I have thrown at them a different scenario to think about.  What if those profiting from automation and outsourcing agreed to guarantee every American an income that will be at higher-than-poverty level, and they can work and earn more if they chose to?  The possibility of a permanent vacation. Every day will be a weekend. A Sengottai/Pattamadai life of minimal work.

Almost always, students do not like that idea.  Sitting around, or even standing around in a museum, doing nothing can become a bore.  Fishing is fun when you do it once in a while, but not day in day out.  Or, given the Puritanical streak, some see the virtue in working as a means of not merely earning a livelihood but about feeling good about oneself and the path to god and heaven.

Of course, that guaranteed minimum income is only a thought experiment.  But, I am not the only one who has been thinking like that--I am merely an insignificant person to think about it ;)

A simple idea for eliminating poverty is garnering greater attention in recent weeks: automatically have the government give every adult a basic income.
The Atlantic's Matt Bruenig and Elizabeth Stoker brought up the idea a few weeks ago when they contemplated cutting poverty in half, and Annie Lowrey revisited it in today's issue of the New York Times Magazine.

See, there are quite a few of us loons out there!

Why are we even constructing such thought experiments?  Because it makes things simpler at one level:

a minimum income would also allow us to eliminate every government benefit as well. Get rid of SNAP, TANF, housing vouchers, the Earned Income tax credit and many others. Get rid of them all. A 2012 Congressional Research Service report found that the federal government spends approximately $750 billion each year on benefits for low-income Americans and that rises to a clean trillion when you factor in state programs. Eliminate all of those and the net figure comes out to $1.2 trillion needed to pay for a universal basic income, still a hefty sum.

Interesting, right?  I tell ya, this thinking business is a whole lot of entertainment that no amount of sports and movies can equal ;)

Of course, with a Congress that can't even figure out what color toilet paper to use, such radical approaches will forever remain only as thought experiments.  It does not mean that there are no attempts--they are not here in the US though!

Switzerland’s citizens will soon vote on a referendum to give each working-age adult in Switzerland a basic income of $2,800 (2,500 francs) per month.

We are living in some interesting times.

A couple of miles outside Sengottai

How do you deal with the poverty that you know exists?

One does not have to take college courses to know that there is poverty on this planet. We also know that people can disagree about the number of people in poverty and all those disagreements on the numbers does not mean that poverty is a figment of our imaginations.

Which means it is clear that we--you and I and billion others--go about our lives fully knowing that there are hundreds of millions of people around the world who are terribly poor.  Depending on our own economic levels, we spend money in various ways that we know will be tremendously useful if we spent it on the poor instead.

Many of us are religious too, and every religion instructs its believers to take care of the poor.  No religious leader teaches the faithful to ignore those in need.

Yet, we carry on with our lives while ignoring the poor.  Are we heartless bastards?

A few years ago, I reflected in this piece at Planetizen on my struggles in figuring out how to draw the line between my life and the problems of the world, especially about poverty:

Growing up in India I always felt awkward and uncomfortable when we watered our garden while squatters stood outside the fence hoping to collect a pot or two of water. Eating candies in a railway station while malnourished children begged for food was another guilt-provoking event.

My point is that I simply did not wake up thinking about this blog post--it has been a struggle all my life.  The post is merely a trigger response to a couple of readings that came my way.

First this, on world hunger--a lack of enough food:

I bet you don't even have to refer to the map-legend to figure out that green means good.

Though there are still roughly 870 million hungry people in the world according to the Food and Agriculture Organization, the trends are positive overall, with global hunger falling by one third since 1990.

870 million hungry people.  Think about that number for a minute.  It gets difficult, at least for that one minute, to eat while you read all this, right?

Isn't it amazing that we will continue on with our lives even after knowing that there are at least 870 million hungry people on this planet?  Including children?

We have no doubts that poverty is real.  So?

For reasons I cannot entirely explain, transformative change has always come from economic development, and economic development has always come from economic liberalization. It comes from trade, economic freedom, capital formation (including education), peace, and the absence of corruption. Mosquito nets will save lives, but they will not make the poor rich.
The best ways to assist with economic liberalization are unknown to me, but by participating in world trade, we make it more attractive for countries to join in and less attractive for countries to opt out. So, the best way for me to do good is to do what I already was doing.
Which is convenient and a relief, because I was going to keep doing it anyway.

Yes, you buying the iPhone not only makes you feel better, it also helps millions bring themselves out of poverty.  You don't believe me?  Ask the Chinese for evidence on this!

Way past time to retire the phrase "it's a dog's life"

Many years ago, when my parents were visiting with us here in America, my father joked, tongue-in-cheek, that if one does do good things in life, then they will be reborn in the US as dogs.  From what he noticed at our home and elsewhere, he was convinced that a dog's life here was infinitely better than the human condition in almost every place on the planet, especially in India.

Speedy (left) and Congo (right)

If only he had known how much better it would get for my dog, Congo.  Speedy died, and it was all Congo's after that.  He had his own small little bed. Actually, three small little beds in different parts of the home.  On top of that, he always had the option to sleep on the bed that we humans slept on.  Dog food. Vet bills. Riding shotgun. And, during walks, if he his small legs got tired, well, I carried him!

We spend quite a bit on dogs and other pets.  Insane amounts.  A few weeks ago, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported:

• In 2011, households spent more on their pets annually than they spent on alcohol ($456), residential landline phone bills ($381), or men and boys clothing ($404).
• Average household spending on pet food alone was $183 in 2011. This was more than the amount spent on candy ($87), bread ($107), chicken ($124), cereal ($175), or reading materials ($115).
• Even when spending at restaurants dropped during the recent recession (December 2007–June 2009), spending on pet food stayed constant. (See chart 1.)
• In 2011, one-sixth of U.S. households purchased pet food each week, based on entries in the CE Diary.⁵
• Married couples without children living at home spent the most on their pets.
• Homeowners spent almost three times as much on pets as renters did.

An average of about $500 a year per household.  

One doesn't need an economics doctorate to think about how much $500 will mean to humans in any number of countries around the world.  Consider this, for instance: even adjusting for purchasing power parity, per capita income in Afghanistan is only about a thousand dollars, and about 400 in Zimbabwe.

One could offer a philosophical argument that life is life and that human life should not be ranked higher than a dog's life or a cat's life.  However, that logic might work only if it is also the same logic used in every other facet of life.  This $500 household spending on pets is in a culture where animals of various sorts are consumed in vast quantities.  Lobsters are boiled alive!  So, this is not any ultra-commitment to life.  

We even take care of diabetic abandoned dogs!

“He requires twice daily insulin injections, but he’s responded so well,” Brooks said. “He’s a ball of energy now.”

The dog was adopted, even though the owner parent knew it would add to the expenditures:

She had purchased a glucose-testing meter specifically designed for canines, although the human version can work, and after talking to Young and hearing about the diabetic pug, she graciously offered to donate it to whomever adopted the dog.
“I now call it Chester’s Tester,” Childers-McDaniel said with a giggle. “I hoped it would be compatible with new test strips, which it is, so I’m happy it’s going to help this little dog.”
Brooks estimated that Wood will spend between $50 to $60 per month on the diabetic supplies Chester will need, which includes Novolin insulin injections — yes, he uses human insulin.

We humans are a strange species!

The poor will always be with us ... NOT!

As I noted in this commentary at Planetizen, back in 2007, the graduate schooling in the social sciences, after an undergraduate in electrical engineering, was a result of wanting to do something to mitigate the suffering that was all around me, and caused by economic deprivation.

It didn't take much to realize that this was no easy project.  But, that made it all the more intellectually fascinating and an important one from a practical standpoint.  Of course, a few years after wrapping up the doctorate, I went the way of "if you can't, teach!"

It is exciting that even without my contribution to this project of poverty reduction, or perhaps because of me not being involved (ha!), the world has gotten incredibly better off over the two decades.  On a scale that I never imagined possible when I was a worrywart sitting on the railroad tracks by the college in Coimbatore. What an amazing transformation, as the Economist points out:

It's getting better all the time, as the Beatles sang.

The Economist notes that biggest reason, a no-brainer, behind this dramatic reduction:

China (which has never shown any interest in MDGs) is responsible for three-quarters of the achievement. Its economy has been growing so fast that, even though inequality is rising fast, extreme poverty is disappearing. China pulled 680m people out of misery in 1981-2010, and reduced its extreme-poverty rate from 84% in 1980 to 10% now.

In graduate school, and remember this was back when there was no sign that the Cold War would end and China was barely into the Deng reform period, it was a matter of routine for studies to compare India and China.  A theme that I have continued to explore here in this blog too.  There is simply no way any rational person can deny that China has done well, and much better than India, on the issue of tackling economic deprivation. It is a tragedy that India's politics is so dysfunctional that the country continues to be the home to the largest number of people in poverty.

There is a long road ahead.  The Economist identifies some of the issues, via the number of "ifs" that it employs, for instance:

If developing countries maintain the impressive growth they have managed since 2000; if the poorest countries are not left behind by faster-growing middle-income ones; and if inequality does not widen so that the rich lap up all the cream of growth—then developing countries would cut extreme poverty from 16% of their populations now to 3% by 2030. That would reduce the absolute numbers by 1 billion. If growth is a little faster and income more equal, extreme poverty could fall to just 1.5%—as near to zero as is realistically possible. The number of the destitute would then be about 100m, most of them in intractable countries in Africa. Misery’s billions would be consigned to the annals of history.

Consider that first "if" on maintaining the impressive economic growth rates.  For more than a year now, I have been concerned, like in this post, that India's growth rates have slowed down and that it could easily slip back to that old "Hindu rate" of growth.  The latest news further confirms that trend--India's growth rate over the past year was the lowest over the decade.  Not at the "Hindu rate" yet, and was a healthy 5%.  But, that simply isn't enough:

While growth of 5% would be high for a developed Western economy, such a rate is insufficient in India to create enough new jobs for a young workforce.

I noted two years ago (in the pre-Ramesh era of this blog!):

I fear that India will have a tough time tackling poverty while another half a billion is added: the politics in the form that is practiced in India precludes the kinds of direct policy interventions that are necessary. Unless the politics changes, the demographic dividend cannot be realized. But, it doesn't look like politics will change there for the better.

We will hope that better heads will prevail.  As the Economist notes, "The world now knows how to reduce poverty."  That knowledge itself is a world of a difference from when I began graduate school.  There are enough reasons to celebrate--the past quarter-century has been phenomenal in terms of poverty reduction.  Won't it be wonderful if we eliminated that acute deprivation well within two decades from now?

Making nuclear power double-D sexy!

In what seems like eons ago, when I had started teaching in California, we were discussing nuclear energy in the economic geography class.  One student, whose name I have forgotten all these years later, with a track record of wisecracks, raised his hand.  I should have known better than to recognize his hand, but I did anyway.  He had a question, which went something like this:

"That is a nuclear power plant, right, by I-5 on the way to San Diego?"  I said yes, not knowing what was coming up after that.

"Why did they build it to look like two boobs?"

The class laughed.

Soure

By no means an original joke that was.  It is such a cliche. One of those typical junior-high humor that giggles on seeing sex in everything.

I was reminded of that when I checked in with The Hindu, as I do every afternoon, and the story on Kundakulam carried this photo:

source

The news item is of critical importance to this nuclear project and to India:

The Supreme Court on Monday said there is no basis to the fear that the radioactive effects of the Kudankulam nuclear power plant, when commissioned, will be far reaching.

The court noted this about petitions challenging the commissioning of Kudankulam nuclear power plant:

Few of them raised the apprehension that it might repeat accidents like the one that had happened at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Union Carbide and Fukushima and so on. Apprehension, however, legitimate it may be, cannot override the justification of the project. Nobody on this earth can predict what would happen in future and to a larger extent we have to leave it to the destiny. But once the justification test is satisfied, the apprehension test is bound to fail.

Yep.  Often people, like the petitioners who are dead set against the nuclear power plant, confuse risk with uncertainty.  All we can do is estimate the probabilities as best as we can.

Frank Knight was an idiosyncratic economist who formalized a distinction between risk and uncertainty in his 1921 book, Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit. As Knight saw it, an ever-changing world brings new opportunities for businesses to make profits, but also means we have imperfect knowledge of future events. Therefore, according to Knight, risk applies to situations where we do not know the outcome of a given situation, but can accurately measure the odds. Uncertainty, on the other hand, applies to situations where we cannot know all the information we need in order to set accurate odds in the first place.

“There is a fundamental distinction between the reward for taking a known risk and that for assuming a risk whose value itself is not known,” Knight wrote. A known risk is “easily converted into an effective certainty,” while “true uncertainty,” as Knight called it, is “not susceptible to measurement.”

We can always invoke uncertainty in order to oppose any project.  In fact, that is very much one of the arguments that some committed environmentalists use when they base their opposition on the "precautionary principle."

The Supreme Court also had observations on energy and economic development, and the critical importance of Kudankulam:

Quoting a report of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the Bench said: “The report highlights that to sustain rapid global economic growth, it is necessary to double the supply of energy and tripling supply of electricity by 2050. Further, it is stated billions of poor people need energy and other life-saving and job-creating technologies.”

India, as I have often noted here, is a power-starved country.  Tamil Nadu, where this nuclear power plant is located, has acute electricity shortages--so much so that there are regularly scheduled rotating outages, which is more than 12 to 14 hours every day in the rural areas.  India has a huge challenge in terms of electricity generation.  In such a context, to oppose the Kudankulam project simply because it has the word "nuclear" in it is awfully stupid and irresponsible.

I wonder if the opponents in India are aware that one of the original founders of the no-nuke-movement--the co-founder of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore--has long since ditched his opposition and has apologized for equating nuclear power plants with nuclear bombs.  Or that even the climate change guru, James Hansen, calculates that nuclear power plants have saved lives that would have been lost because of pollution from coal-fired plants that would have otherwise been built.  Do the opponents really prefer that India build more coal power plants instead?  Or, do they want to condemn the hundreds of millions of India's poor to their poor and neglected state?

As a former minister for India's environment bluntly stated:

“I know the environmentalists will not be very happy with my decision, but it is foolish romance to think that India can attain high growth rate and sustain the energy needs of a 1.2 billion population with the help of solar, wind, biogas and such other forms of energy. It is paradoxical that environmentalists are against nuclear energy”

Yes, "foolish romance" indeed!