Eye of Siva
Rants of a nerd
The only good thing from the cruise ship disaster
0Those not living under rocks would have come across the sad story of the Costa Concordia. The ship hit a rock off the coast of Italy and has resulted in a loss of several lives as she foundered. It is all very sad. The only good thing coming out may be that we will probably forever be done with the song My Heart Will Go On by Celine Dion. Apparently they were playing this song on board when the ship hit the rock.
Who plays a song from Titanic on board a cruise liner?
Apparently the comparisons to the Titanic are apposite as passengers complained of fights for lifejackets and delays in the deployment of lifeboats. Incidentally one of the survivors of this shipwreck is the grand child of a Titanic survivor.
First they came for
0What with the SOPA blackouts, the Occupy Wall Street protests and the Tea Party movement (hey where are those guys now?), it reminds me of Martin Niemöller’s famous statement:
First they came for the communists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak out because I was Protestant.Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.
See also the poem Hangman by Maurice Ogden.
Much as the fable of the camel who worms his way into the Arab’s tent, the state always attempts to encroach on individual rights. Under kings and dictators, this is to be expected. And indeed there usually comes a breaking point when the populace rises in a revolution. The despot is deposed. A new ruler is installed. Rinse and repeat.
But how does this play out in a liberal democracy? When a parliament usurps our rights in our name, how do we stand up for ourselves. After all we have elected the representatives who now act against us. Is our consent not implicit in their actions? The erosion of freedoms in the name of security is one of the easiest to spot. Giving up civil rights in the name of security is like going to war for the sake of peace. For, the fundamental objective of security should be the protection of civil (or individual) rights.
So liberal democracies do not trust their parliaments to do the right thing and they have constitutions to protect individual rights. Sadly even this does not seem to be sufficient. The world’s two largest democracies have seen governments expand at the cost of citizen’s rights. The erosion of fundamental rights in the United States was probably obvious enough sixty years ago that the Indian Constituent Assembly chose to already limit rights of citizens when it drafted the Constitution of India. Note that this link is the amended version.
The original constitution granted six fundamental rights, each in a restricted format; these being the rights to equality, freedom, religion, culture and education, right against exploitation and right to constitutional remedies. The rights to freedom included the freedoms of speech and expression, assembly, form associations, move freely, reside in any part of the country, own property, and practice any profession.
Today, though many of these rights have been gutted. This is especially true of the right to property, which is no longer a fundamental right in India! The right to free speech is being gutted through the many censorship laws in the country (including the current government push to censor the internet). The destruction of the right to property is discussed in great detail in this paper by Sushanth Salian of the think-tank Centre for Civil Society.
The only new right created has been the right to education but given the government’s treatment of existing rights, probably means that private education will be over a period of time be eliminated in an attempt to indoctrinate the public. It is probably the route to a Ministry of Truth. Welcome to 1984.
As this post is getting over long already, I will get back to the right to freedoms in another post.
Swiss Alps From Above
0Photos taken from an airplane window on a flight out of Zurich, Switzerland. These were taken last year. Though some of the colours may appear false, they did appear so when viewed from above just as the sun was about to set. In some of the photos you can see the sky reddened by the setting sun.
Eco-War
0I’ve been following this economics war (argument may be more appropriate) between the usual Keynsian and Chicago schools. I have picked out some of the posts in this spat rather than collect all of them since many are just flanking in nature and weren’t advancing the debate.
John Cochrane (Univ of Chicago) makes the case that fiscal stimulus does not work as the fiscal multiplier is zero. The argument is simple: government can spend only out of taxes or borrowing. Higher taxes reduces consumption, higher borrowing can only be backed up by expected future taxes & therefore have the same impact as higher taxes (Ricardian equivalence). He raises Keynsian heckles by saying:
For these and other reasons, Keynesian ISLM models have not been taught in any serious graduate school since at least 1980, except as interesting fallacies or history of thought.
Simon Wren-Lewis gets worked up and calls out Cochrane (and Robert Lucas too) by saying that government spending works here and now, but any fall in consumption due to higher taxes is smoothed out over time, leading to fiscal stimulus. Wren-Lewis also cites a Brad de Long post arguing the same thing. This post seems to be just a commentary without any charts or equations to support his case. He ups the ante a bit on the spat with this line:
I prefer to just note that if any undergraduate or graduate student in the UK wrote this in an exam, they would lose marks.
Scott Sumner wades in saying that it is tough to argue against an identity. With the example of a closed economy, he breaks down in four steps why Cochrane is right and Wren-Lewis is not. Sumner’s quote I pick:
Undergraduate quiz? He’s going to bitterly regret that snide remark.
And then, the champion of Keynes, Paul Krugman wades in with a dismissive post on comparative statics. He makes the standard ISLM claims in what he calls a very wonkish post, but sadly seems to have missed most of Sumner’s argument. While Krugman is brilliant (I have been following his work my entire career going back to the Asian financial crisis), in recent years his Keynesian bias has gotten so bad that he is unwilling to give credence to any other point of view. He wasn’t always this way, but he says his earlier views were incorrect.
Sumner thinks we have made some kind of basic error, and ties himself into knots trying to set us straight. It’s really very sad.
I am going to give Sumner closing comments in this debate with his post where he says that by now “I should be used to Paul Krugman responding to arguments I never made.”
Thus they are forced to fall back on the argument that the basic Keynesian model is true because we assume it’s true. Fine, then say so.
Stay classy guys.
Post on account
0As the government introduces votes on account to keep from shutting down, today’s post is ‘on account’. I had set aside a bunch of stuff around David Hume and public credit in the context of the worldwide expansion of central bank balance sheets and fiscal deficits, but it will have to wait until later.
Laughing stock of the world
0When a High Court judge says that it is possible to impose China-like internet controls, one wonders whether we still believe in a liberal democracy?
The case is the ongoing dispute between the government and a series of websites (Google and Facebook among the prominent ones) about censorship. The Reuters headline India court warns Web giants about China-style controls portrays a country that seems quite ready to abandon free speech in a quixotic quest for a clean internet.
The story is everywhere from Indian newspapers like the Hindustan Times and the Times of India to international tech-oriented sites such as the Register and Ars Technica. The Wall Street Journal’s blog interviewed Vinay Rai, who filed the lawsuits. WSJ calls him India’s censorship crusader. What is absolutely incredible is that he is himself a journalist. Why would a journalist pursue censorship? Is there a hidden agenda here?
We will soon be the laughing stock of the world as the world’s largest democracy starts on the road to fascism.
Flying Blind at the Fed
0The 2006 transcripts of the meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the chief decision making body of the US Federal Reserve system has made good fodder for several economics and finance reporters since their release late last week. Several commentators have chosen to just pick up some choice quotes from the minutes including the Financial Times’ Alphaville blog. The best I have found so far is the Atlantic, from where I have taken the title to this post. It compares the Fed’s leaders to the pilots of Air France’s ill-fated AF447, which crashed into the ocean due to a combination of worsening flying conditions and the pilots not responding to incoming warnings.
By 2006, it was apparent that the US housing market was coming apart. Evidence on the ground and through statistics was already telling a tale of slowdown. I remember being in a fixed income conference in Europe in 2005, where there was near unanimous view that the US economy would slow on the back of a housing slowdown.
The lack of appreciation for this in the corridors of economic power is what astonishes anyone reading these transcripts. FOMC chairman Bernanke seems to be the only one warning of a wider impact of the housing crash on the macro economic landscape. Others including then vice-chairman and now US Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner seemed to have had no sense of the impending doom. The fact that the same slate of people remain in charge today under a different President is a question mark on the state of political decision making in the United States.
The choicest quote goes to Geithner speaking to Greenspan on the maestro’s last meeting as chair: I think the risk that we decide in the future that you’re even better than we think is higher than the alternative.
Should we start using the word maestro to mean something else? A Nero like behaviour of fiddling while Rome burnt?
Must read: mental substitution
0Bryan Caplan reads Kahneman; and David Henderson picks up on the same. Very good reading in full (links below).
The point being made (quote from Henderson) is: people answer the question they want to answer rather than the question that was asked. This is especially the case for left brain-right brain type of questions. It is easier to respond intuitively or emotively to a question rather than rationally. Structured, quantitative or rational questions are replaced by a near equivalent heuristic in one’s head. This applies to economics questions (Caplan’s post has several examples) or political ones (Henderson).
Henderson in particular points to how media uses the emotive equivalent (in the example he quotes, the question of profanity on television) and changes a first amendment freedom of press question into a personal values question. Of course that is the United States, where the first amendment has usually found strong support in the courts. He does cite John Roberts (chief justice of the US Supreme Court) similarly framing the question in a heuristic fashion that seems to suggest he is on the side of diluting freedom of speech.
Here in India though the government and the courts have generally never been shy in placing restrictions on free speech. Indeed the constitution itself has been amended (first1 and sixteenth amendments notably) to restrict free speech in the name of security, public order, decency or morality, defamation, etc. And who is to determine what is decency or morality? Where does restriction in the name of decency end and censorship of political speech start?
In the same context the ongoing dispute between the government and major websites including Google and Facebook is a case in point. The government wants these websites to censor their users’ posts. There are some lawsuits in Indian courts on the same subject. On the internet, no one forces you to read any website. There is an active participation by the viewer by clicking on web links to get to the content. If you do not like the article in question or the website in question browse away. No one forces you to go online. If you choose to go online and get offended, you have only yourself to blame.
The same applies to offline content. Don’t like a television channel? Stop watching it. Don’t like a newspaper? Stop your subscription. Choice is available and it is up to the user to decide what he consumes.
Democracy is hard won and liberty is an integral part of democracy. My freedom of speech and expression is as important to me as your freedom to take offense. As they say in a democracy every one is entitled to his or her opinion and is entitled to express it. However no one is forced to listen to another’s opinion. The road to fascism starts with abrogation of these basic democratic principles.
1Ironically our First Amendment placed restrictions on free speech while the US First Amendment was part of the Bill of Rights that guarantees certain freedom to US citizens.
P.S. This article started from mental substitution and ended up as a rant on liberal democracy. I don’t know how.
Restaurant menu fail
0This is an actual restaurant take-away menu from a place improbably called the Hotel Cafe Deluxe; and which serves Veg, Non Veg and Chinese. Take a look at the menu.
This is the back page, but I have it on as it has the fold-out front page on. So we see such delicacies as various souses (sauces) and a crish pea chicken (crispy?). Incidentally souce is spelt sause in places, so there is more than one way to err. One learns from one’s mistakes and finds new ways to make mistakes. And let us not pass over shop for soup, and don’t even ask me what Attention Soup and Lump Pung Shop are – for I have no idea. And what about the great Chicken One don ciliyr soup (Chicken Wonton Clear Soup). Creme for cream would have been okay with a grave accent in the right place.
Those are not all the errors, of course. As they say in text books, the rest is left as an exercise for the reader.
And here is the main page. Once again enough hilarity almost on every line. Competition time folks, find as many errors as possible. Comment away.
Note that clicking on the photos will take you away to flickr.com, so you might want to Control-Click / Command-Click to force open in a new tab instead.
