yazadjal.com

We shall now continue our quest to calculate the GDP of our economy consisting of two people, me and Yazad. I shall now answer the four questions that were asked in the previous post.

The GDP here is Rs. 260. This is how:
Ravi: 70 rupees of value-from-wheat + 30 rupees of value-from-dancer = 100
Yazad: 70 rupees […]

One Kersi Shroff makes the following comment in response to this entry of mine
Just one little point to be noted….
The IITs which are government run educational institutions giving top notch education at amazingly reasonable prizes(compared to the top western universities) were entirely a Nehruvian socialist idea. So stop critcizing Nehru when you’re just a […]

A female colleague has put up a copy of the poem If… by Rudyard Kipling in her cubicle. But she has changed the last line to “And which is more, you will be grown up my child”
Such violence to my favourite poem hit close to my heart, but I could see that she […]

Today’s Economic Times carries an editorial entitled “Democracy - receding tide?” by Bronislaw Geremek (A former Solidarity leader). The article talks about the disillusionment with democracy in many parts of the world, as highlighted by The Pew Global Attitudes Project for 2003. Though people in countries with limited democracy seem to want more freedoms, those […]

Lots going on in the wonderful world of outsourcing. A few different angles to look at.
CNN’s Lou Dobbs put out a rogue’s list of American companies which are “exporting America.” James Glassman hits back with an interesting idea — invest in these stocks folks!
And perhaps the US might want to export Dobbs himself. Tech […]

I haven’t seen a single sensible argument in favour of the fee cut that Joshi is forcing down the IIMs’ throats. The fee cut has no economic rationale. No one asked for it. The students of these IIMs themselves are protesting the hike, seeing it for the obvious power grab it is. Joshi himself […]

From the Economist
The short history of society’s fight against spam—usually defined as unwanted commercial e-mail—may be about to pass into a significant third phase. In the first phase, it was geeks who led the resistance, using techie weapons such as e-mail filters with fancy Bayesian mathematics. In the second phase, politicians joined in, eager to […]

With elections upon us and citizen’s groups urging the middle class to vote, I thought this question to be essential.
Q. Who Gets A Better Prime Minister . . .
… - a conscientious, informed, principled and intelligent voter or a dim-witted and ignorant voter?

A. They both get the same Prime Minister!
[Direct lift from No Treason […]

I am amazed at the rich variety of perspectives for the same story. Read Rediff’s view and compare it with what the New Scientist has to say.
Google News has more.

There is a story that the famous French mercantilist minister, Colbert, once asked a group of businessmen what he could do for them. One of the men, Legendre, is supposed to have replied, Laissez nous faire–leave us alone. Several French authors in the earlier part of the 18th century, including the Marquis d’Argenson, used the […]

landlord, cowboy, brotherhood, yacht, cult, primitive, addict, alumni, American, elderly, illiterate, mankind, penmanship, teenager, third world, uncivilized, underprivileged, unmarried, widow or widower, masterpiece or mastery.
Just some of the words you won’t find in an American textbook because an anti-bias committee has airbrushed the literature.
It’s funny when a line Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the […]

Digdug made this comment on Ravi’s driving license post.
For me “we” own the roads(opposed to your view of the government owning the roads) and the government only administers them on “our” behalf.
I wonder how “we” as citizens own the roads. The only analogy that comes close is that of a shareholder in a company. […]

I am glad that I waited for a day before coming up with the answers. The wrong answers provide ample support to my hypothesis. To clarify, what I am trying to prove here is that:
Economics is not that difficult to understand if you try to understand it the way physicists and engineers understand and […]

I got my driving license recently. I did not have to actually take the test or anything. The driving school had bribed the RTO officials and we got the license just by going there.
I believe that this is the norm all over India. Even when the test does take place nominally, it […]

Gautam claims below that the approach required to understand economics is different from the one that I would use as an engineer. I beg to differ. Rather than argue over theory, I would like to prove him wrong by explaining Macroeconomics the way I understand it, which I believe is the way a physicist […]

I would like to transcend the topic of Agriculture, but before I do, I would like to answer the points raised by one Avelin in response to my original post. There he(?) claims that productivity is just a “numeric measure” that has no relation to reality and that we should move to a more “human […]

There are some issues that came up in Ravi’s Posts about Agriculture (here and here) that I think need to be addressed.
I think it is important to clarify somethings both about Economics and how it applies to the real world.

No one needs to be told that reality, is a complex, dynamic phenomenon, and to try […]

Gaurav Sabnis whacks Mad Max Joshi and his IIM policies. I’m not going to excerpt it. Go read the whole piece.
Update from Ravi:
Yup. Read it. Gaurav is very angry and so am I. I should have posted on the whole thing, but I couldn’t, because I was very, very angry too.

(I am taking this back. See here)
In response to my post on Rajeev Srinivasan’s Innumeracy, one Mahesh writes
Three conclusions that I can draw from [yo]ur response to Rajeev’s article:
1. You are a non-IITian(so am I..). Thats why you tend to pick on what his background is rather than the article first.
2. I think he has […]

Sauvik Chakraverti was in Mangalore and he writes about his observations. As usual, a good read.
The other day I was taken to a beach just beyond the New Mangalore Port Trust. What struck was the wall. The entire port is surrounded by a 20 ft high wall.
… because of some theory, Mangalore has moved […]