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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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Surjit Bhalla calls a bluff. Globalisation is more frightening for the middle class in the first world who have seen their incomes plateau.
He takes a look at growth rates of per capita income both pre and post globalisation and makes a simple hypothesis pitting the first world’s Mary with a third world Sita.
The leaders […]

(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 […]

Madhu Kishwar on Anti-Globalisation Brigades (AGBs) and India doing better under the WTO.
She talks about the origin of the anti-globalisation movement with the rise of economic power in the second and third worlds. Western AGBs are more worried about their job losses to India caused by globalisation and Indian “activists” are happy to serve as […]

David Marsten at Catallarchy shows how regulation creates a big busines - big government nexus which feeds each other and creates more regulation. Consumers and small businesses are the losers in this game.

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 […]

Madhu Kishwar exposes the hypocrisy of the Anti-Globalisation Brigade (AGB) currently parading in Bombay under diferent guises — World Social Forum, Mumbai Resistance, etc. Her focus is on NGOs who happily accept foreign aid and grants, while trying to prevent the ordinary Indian from trading and participating in the world economy.
She also brings to […]

High on my “to-blog-about” list is this article on Friedrich Hayek by Virginia Postrel. It’s a wonderful introduction to an economist who won the Nobel for his work on monetary theory, and had a varied repetoire that included several works on political science, philosopy, law and psychology!
Beginning with “The Sensory Order,” he began to differentiate […]

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, […]

Thomas Sowell hits home with a strong defense of the power of wealth to do good.
Within a week of each other, two earthquakes struck on opposite sides of the world — an earthquake measuring 6.5 on the Richter scale in California and a 6.6 earthquake in Iran. But, however similar the earthquakes, the human costs […]

Everybody seems to be getting on the economics Nobel bandwagon. Madsen Pirie at the Adam Smith Institute in London has this in his 2004 Almanack:
The Nobel Prize in Economics is awarded to ‘the world’s consumers’ on the grounds that they do more for economics than any academic. An Ohio housewife is chosen by lottery to […]

Samuel Brittan adds his voice to those wanting reform in the economics Nobel prize.
If Caldwell is right then the Nobel Prize for economics was a mistake as the subject could not expect the kind of steady incremental progress achievable in the physical sciences - or for that matter in ancillary studies such as statistical theory. […]

Brad Edmonds at LewRockwell.com spends his Christmas Eve identifying with Ebenezer Scrooge. In this era with continual sound bites about corporate social responsibility, Edmonds suggests that “the two most charitable things you can do are start a business, and reduce government.”
Scrooge protests that Marley was a good businessman in life; and Scrooge himself is a […]

Please read this article over at the McKinsey quarterly. Free registration required, but worth it.

I don’t call people stupid or silly, or any person’s arguments idiotic. The reason, as I’ve explained in my scrape with Jivha sometime back, is that if a person’s argument is self-evidently idiotic, then it is redundant to call him as such and it is an insult to my readers’ intelligence to explain why […]

The Mises Daily Article features an interview of Sudha Shenoy, one of the few Indian proponents of Austrian economics. (The only other that I know is my former boss, Parth Shah of the Centre for Civil Society) Shenoy has strong words to say about the economics profession.
I’m prepared to say that nearly every economics department […]

The Supreme Court in Commissioner, Hindu Religious Endowments, Madras v. Lakshmindra Tirtha Swamiar (1954) points out that
tax is the compulsory extraction of money by public authority for public purpose enforceable by law and is not payment for service rendered.
This little gem I got while studying The Consumer Protection Act, 1986. A taxpayer cannot be considered […]