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It’s not just cricket! You can also bet on who will win the next Nobel prize in Economics. (Or the other Nobels.)
Marginal Revolution has some market information on the contenders.
Last year I’d posted thrice on the topic:
Tilting at Nobel windmills
Nobel Prize in Social Sciences?
More Econ Nobel
I much prefer Madsen Pirie’s prediction:
The Nobel Prize […]

More from Boudreaux and Café Hayek.
consider the folk wisdom that insists that it’s better to make computer chips than to make potato chips.
This adage is nonsense. Herman Lay made millions producing potato chips. And in the process of producing his personal fortune, he made consumers and workers better off.
And not just Herman Lay. We have […]

Surjit Bhalla looks closely at some poverty figures and finds a few discrepancies.
The World Bank believes that poverty in India is 35 per cent; official government of India data suggest it is 24 per cent; and if these official data are corrected for definition differences and accurate price data, then poverty in 2000 is only […]

Busting some myths about trade unionism.
The shorter work week is entirely a capitalist invention. As capital investment caused the marginal productivity of labor to increase over time, less labor was required to produce the same levels of output. As competition became more intense, many employers competed for the best employees by offering both better pay […]

The tide is turning. After years of being fed the nonsense that our large and increasing population was the main reason for our lack of prosperity, I was quite surprised to see the Times of India making a bold stand. A news article on today’s front page accompanied by the lead edit inside.
Well, […]

Interesting piece of news: Reliance plans to do a Wal-Mart in India.
Considering that the cartel had an small debate on the issue barely a month back, I’d love to continue it in the light of the “Reliance in retail” angle.
My take is that the retail market is ripe, not just at the high end, but […]

Before The Cartel pronounces its verdict on our new Finance Minister’s budget, what are the opinions of AnarCapLib readers? Are you happy? Sad? Excited? Depressed?
If you have written an opinion on your own blog, send a trackback to this entry.
Update: Nilu asks a valid question:

In a typically of the Indian way of doing things, […]

Libertarian principles sometimes lead to “icky” solutions for certain problems. Let’s take sex selection of foetuses as an example. A libertarian would not advocate banning the practice, although it leads to a skewed male-female ratio and aggravates many social problems. I’d say “let it be” — no need for regulation here.
Those who disagree, please […]

The Economist is sceptical of the economic and allied benefits of hosting big sporting events like Euro 2004 or the Olympics, especially if host countries like Portugal and Greece are small and have struggling economies. (Subscription article)
The tournament will surely give the Portuguese economy a bit of zing over the summer. For the past month […]

So they worked it out. The Congress (I) and the Left agreed on a Common Minimum Programme for this country, even though the Left’s outdated ideas have died in the very countries from which they came.
Suman Palit, a fellow Libertarian, however is not impressed. He recommends, “…if you have money invested in India, I […]

Before picking up individual issues on why India is poor, I’d like to classify the issues that came out of the comments. The classification is not going to be perfect, but it allows me to club the issues into manageable morsels. BTW, these are in no particular order.

Corruption (I’d include lack of ethics in this)
Lack […]

Pro-poor reform is the new political mantra in India. Personally, I think economic reform should ensure that there are no poor. But before we can do that, it might help to find out why is India poor? What is it that we lack or what are the chains that bind us to what is often […]

Quick, without googling, tell me who is Norman Borlaug?
Once again. No googling please. I’ve talked of him on my blog earlier so no looking there either, and if you know about him only from looking there earlier, you are disqualified from answering. It is supposed to be Indian tradition to be eternally grateful to […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]