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governments basically do three things: "Medicate, educate and incarcerate."
"When we shrink investments in higher education and research, "we shoot ourselves in both feet," remarked K.R. Sridhar, founder of Bloom Energy, the Silicon Valley fuel-cell company. "Our people become less skilled, so you are shooting yourself in one foot. And the smartest people from around the world have less reason to come here for the quality education, so you are shooting yourself in the other foot." " I can lose weight quickly if I cut off both arms, but it will surely reduce my job prospects.
"Empowering the individual and underinvesting in the collective is our great macro danger as a society," said the pollster Craig Charney. Indeed, it is. Investment in our collective institutions and opportunities is the only way to mitigate the staggering income inequalities that can arise from a world where Facebook employees can become billionaires overnight, while the universities that produce them are asked to slash billions overnight. As I've said, nations that don't invest in the future tend not to do well there.
in list: Insights into World affairs, BUILD SOCEITY: leader qualifications
Unless the rich and poor encounter one another in everyday life, it is hard to think of ourselves as engaged in a common project. At a time when to fix our society we need to do big, hard things together, the marketization of public life becomes one more thing pulling us apart.
“Democracy does not require perfect equality,” he concludes, “but it does require that citizens share in a common life. ... For this is how we learn to negotiate and abide our differences, and how we come to care for the common good.”
in list: Insights into World affairs
" If you tell people the world is complicated, you’re not doing your job as a social scientist. They already know it’s complicated. Your job is to distill it, simplify it, and give them a sense of what is the single [cause], or what are the couple of powerful causes that explain this powerful phenomenon.”
That’s the job of a lot of leaders, isn’t it? Take complexity and simplify it, then explain it, then assign causes, and finally propose action for dealing with it."
in list: Insights into World affairs, BUILD SOCEITY: leader qualifications
"Many bureaucrats and politicians, courtiers at the cosy empire that runs India, oppose Nilekani because if the UID delivers all that it promises, the empire stands to lose its power and patronage networks. "
in list: Insights into World affairs
"This is what prosperity is: the increase in the amount of goods or services you can earn with the same amount of work."
"If I make the clothes, you catch the food" brings increasing returns. Indeed, it has the beautiful property that it does not even need to be fair. For barter to work, two individuals do not need to offer things of equal value. Trade is often unequal, but still benefits both sides. barter -- the simultaneous exchange of different objects -- was itself a human breakthrough, perhaps even the chief thing that led to the ecological dominance and burgeoning material prosperity of the species.
with frequent setbacks, trust has gradually and progressively grown, spread, and deepened during human history, because of exchange.
chickens and fish convert grain into meat three times as efficiently as cattle; pigs are in between) - and a great deal of trade, not just because the mouths and the plants will not be in the same place, but also because trade encourages specialization in the best-yielding crops for any particular district.
Farm subsides and import tariffs on cotton, sugar, rice, and other products cost Africa $500 billion a year in lost export opportunities -- or twelve times the entire aid budget to the continent.
Rural self-sufficiency is a romantic mirage. Urban opportunity is what people want.
in list: Insights into World affairs, how to be an adult & be great at it too
"Unless we have root-and-branch judicial reform to speed up processes and verdicts, the new Lokpal will simply increase the already formidable backlog of incomplete cases in the courts."
in list: Insights into World affairs
not with advocating for one side, but with unearthing the relevant facts and law. instead of two lawyers being paid based on whether they win, their pay would be based on how well and cost-effectively they were able to identify the facts and law of the case.
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" sit down to write a giant list of unanswered questions, for situations where we don't know if an intervention works: this will be most of them. Then we filter down to questions where a randomised trial can feasibly be run. Then we do them.
This won't cost money: it will save money, in unprecedented amounts, by permitting disinvestment in failed interventions, and it will transform the country. It's efficient, it's sensible, and it will never happen, because politicians are too ignorant of these simple ideas, too arrogant to have their ideologies questioned, and too scared - let's be generous - of hard data on their good intentions."
ideology, which is ultimately societal narcissism. (See minutes 8:30-10) And when that narcissism is threatened the response is rage, which for a society is revolution.
History is full of examples of what happens after the rage– vacuums filled by dictators
Averaging over many risk levels, is it better if advisors can only advise, or if they can also ban? The answer depends on whether an all-knowing advisor would prefer more activity or less than an all-knowing doer. When the answer is less, the game turns out to be too complex to say much in general. When the answer is more, however, then the power to ban on average makes both sides worse off!
Similarly, regulators who think that a reasonable public who understood the true quality of doctors and drugs would still choose too little medicine should regret being able to ban via professional licensing and drug regulation. And those who think that the public saves too little of their income may regret being able to ban investments via securities regulations.
in list: Insights into World affairs
We cannot say that development-related issues are long term while the immediate task is to annihilate the Naxalites
in list: Insights into World affairs
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we cannot brush aside the underlying issues of poverty, deprivation and lack of justice that are breeding tension and anger in many rural and tribal areas of the country. We cannot say that these development-related issues are long term
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it never presented data on how it had shared revenues that it got from mining with the people. It did not explain how it had controlled the enormous and deadly pollution from the sponge iron factories that encircled the region. It did not also explain why it was allowing the open manipulation and misuse of laws to dispossess people of their lands against their will. It branded as anti-development those who were questioning mining policies and seeking new answers. The next step was to say that we were against the state and on the side of the Naxalites. With us or against us. This is a war syndrome, which cannot buy us peace at any cost.
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colonization--->Indian independence--->globalization--->telangana-maoists-adivasis/pheasants unrest --->operation green hunt--->colonization of rural poor--->what's the escape?
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Maoists wish to take political power through the barrel of their guns, and the India state wishes to grab Adivasi lands and natural resources and hand them over to corporations, foreign and domestic. Thus, the ‘sandwich theory' sees middle India as the saviour of the nation as envisioned in the Indian Constitution.
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Democracy is based on the belief that all people possess the capacities to determine their destinies. If this is true, then the ‘sandwich theory' is fundamentally undemocratic.
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The fair reason for concern is, again, the transparency problem. Twice in the past year, China has in nonfinancial ways demonstrated the ripples that a nontransparent policy creates. Last January, its military intentionally shot down one of its own satellites, filling orbital paths with debris. The exercise greatly alarmed the U.S. military, because of what seemed to be an implied threat to America’s crucial space sensors. For several days, the Chinese government said nothing at all about the test, and nearly a year later, foreign analysts still debate whether it was a deliberate provocation, the result of a misunderstanding, or a freelance effort by the military. In November, China denied a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, the Kitty Hawk, routine permission to dock in Hong Kong for Thanksgiving, even though many Navy families had gone there for a reunion. In each case, the most ominous aspect is that outsiders could not really be sure what the Chinese leadership had in mind. Were these deliberate taunts or shows of strength? The results of factional feuding within the leadership? Simple miscalculations? In the absence of clear official explanations no one really knew, and many assumed the worst.
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Where the money goes, other kinds of power follow. Just ask Mikhail Gorbachev, as he reflects on the role bankruptcy played in bringing down the Soviet empire. While Japan’s great wealth has not yet made it a major diplomatic actor, and China has so far shied from, rather than seized, opportunities to influence events outside its immediate realm, time and money could change that. China’s military is too weak to challenge the U.S. directly even in the Taiwan Straits, let alone anyplace else. That, too, could change.
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Manmohan Singh [ Images ] is touted as the father of Indian economic reforms but as Singh has himself acknowledged it was Rao was fathered the process. Singh was an economic technocrat with little understanding of the political constraints. It was Rao who shielded Singh from the Left of his own party who had left no stone unturned in opposing the economic liberalisation programme.
Rao deftly navigated the political waters at a time when his own party was out to scuttle his most ambitions undertaking and made economic reforms politically tenable
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The other major challenge that India faced in the early 1990s was on the foreign policy front. The world had suddenly become unipolar with India's main ally, the Soviet Union, virtually disappearing from the world map. Recognising that India would need the support of the West and especially the US if the economic reforms were to succeed, Rao laid the foundations for a revival of US-India ties acknowledging the importance of the US in the global strategic architecture.
But he was clear that India needed other major powers as well and so his attempts to manage ties with China and Russia [ Images ] even at a time when Russia was widely viewed as a power on an irreversible downward spiral. In West Asia, Rao had the courage that no other Indian leader had. He established full diplomatic ties with Israel in 1992 even as he reached out to Iran, paying a landmark visit to Tehran in 1993 becoming the first Indian prime minister to visit Iran since 1979.
Rao was also the initiator of India's 'Look East' Policy. He understood early on that the centre of gravity of global economics was shifting to the East and India's economic future needed to be linked to the booming economies in East Asia. He expanded India's engagements with the ASEAN not only as a matter of India's economic revival but also as a counterweight to the rising Chinese dominance
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The first thing the central government needs to do is to firm up its political resolve not to capitulate on a vital issue under the threat of orchestrated militancy and violence.
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Everyone knows that long-festering problems do not allow for easy solutions. The Telangana issue as we know it has been around for half a century, and there is also a pre-history of a revolutionary struggle against landlordism in the region. The Congress party has always had an ambiguous stand on this issue.
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an army general said with a sad laugh, "the Chinese can relax, we are already doing what they had only expressed a desire to do in an article."
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There is sufficient scope in the Indian Constitution for forming new states, in fact the process has been made fairly easy and uncomplicated in what constitutional experts see as an indication that the founding fathers had visualised exactly such circumstances as the young country matured.
But it is for the governments of the day to examine the demands and to determine through necessary commissions and committees of experts whether the separate state demanded will go a long way in redressing grievances of the affected people, alleviating poverty and in the long run bringing the country closer together.
The Congress cave in has actually legitimised political blackmail, sending out the signal that this could work if taken to extreme limits. Chandrashekhar Rao could have been wooed out of the hunger strike by a special visit from a top Congress functionary. But in what is characteristic Congress style, the party decided to ignore him leaving itself with no option in the final reckoning.
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black day
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1528 A mosque is built on the site which some Hindus claim is the birthplace of Lord Rama
telangana state formation
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Nagpur session, in December 1920, the Congress rewrote its charter under Mahatma Gandhi's [ Images ] guidance. One of the changes was that the Pradesh Congress Committees would henceforth be constituted on a linguistic basis. This made no difference to the administration of the country because the British refused to redraw the map to the Congress' whims
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Sardar Patel, unlike the Mahatma, was no fan of linguistic provinces. When he completed his great work of unifying India [ Images ] he pointedly left intact the multi-lingual states of Madras, Bombay, Madhya Pradesh [ Images ], and Assam. Another notable addition to that list was Hyderabad, which covered several districts now in Maharashtra [ Images ] and Karnataka
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