yazadjal.com

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 […]

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 […]

(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 […]

Ck posted this in the comments section of the increasingly heated discussion about Free Software. He also requests comments, so I’ll give this piece the good ol’ fiske.

The libertarian paradox
By Gerry McGovern
There seems to be a rule that everything embodies a paradox, that everything embodies its opposite.
From the very first period I used the Internet […]

Anya gets the answer right. The theoretical way to do it is to export. That way 60% of our population can work on agriculture, but we consume only 30% worth of it and export the rest. It is not feasible in practice because most rich countries subsidise their farmers to produce enough […]

I have often heard the lament that though 60% of our population depends on agriculture for its livelihood, agriculture contributes only 30% to our GDP. The person doing the lamenting usually wants to increase agriculture’s contribution to the GDP, not reduce the percentage of people depending on farming for their income. But if we […]

(I am taking this back. See here)
This is Bash-a-Mallu-whose-views-you-otherwise-agree-with Week on Anarcaplib. Today’s victim is Rajeev Srinivasan (via JK)
Now, Rajeev graduated from IIT Madras, where presumably he picked up powers of analysis, and with a Marketing MBA from Stanford, where I suppose he learnt spin to argue persuasively. Unfortunately these tendencies seem to have come […]

Over the last few days Jaswant Singh has been doling out sops and tariff rationalisation in an effort to augment the feel good factor in anticipation of the elections. Though it is time to rejoice on account of the tax reductions, what I’d really like to see is a reduction in expenditure, which ofcourse won’t […]

Anchit Sathi, a friend, who lives, studies and works in France, started an email discussion about the French Scarves Scandal. A couple of people including myself responded, this is the email transcript…

Some of you might have heard of the head scarf scandal in france that s been going on for quite a while now. for […]

JK is 5 votes ahead of me in the blog mela and this is a disgrace to all you readers of Anarcaplib. If you haven’t voted for me today, go right away and do so now. Remember that you can vote once a day. You can, and should, vote from both your office […]

In a very readable article published in the American Economic Review (way back in 1998), Ronald Coase outlines the problems with the way that Economists do Economics.

He seems too fall back on Marshall’s old self-critique:

“the Mecca of the economist lies in economic biology rather than in economic dynamics.”

But what amused me about Coase’ piece, […]

I’ve nominated my post The death of a Law to the blog mela being hosted by Shanti. This time you can vote for the best entry and Shanti will give the winner an Amazon gift voucher for 10 dollars. So please vote for me and make me rich beyond my wildest dreams!
Psst. Don’t tell […]

In the previous post about John Itty, Yazad talks about pontification. Another John, Ioannes Paulus PP. II, Karol Wojtyla, the real pontiff, is quoted by Encarta as saying something really strange when he was elected Pope in 1978

“God will forgive you for what you have done to me.”

I wonder what that is supposed to […]

I am glad you people liked my fable. But no - laws are not complicated because lawyers write them or interpret them. They aren’t complicated because lawyers are addicted to verbiage. They are complicated because our laws tend to micromanage the real world, something they shouldn’t do. The real world being complex, the laws […]

There was once a small law. So small that it consisted of only one small paragraph. When it spoke it had the clarity and simplicity of the young. Everyone understood what it meant, and they could interpret it.
The law protected property rights. It said that no one could take away anyone’s property by force, […]

Note:
You should probably skip this. The interesting stuff, like a fisking of the Resident Idiot is below.

I think I will make a series of posts on Common Errors in Reasoning. Once I am done, I will have a handy bunch of URLs I can point people to when they make the same error for the […]