Stalin cynical, Roosevelt great

The halt of the Russian forces at the doors of Warsaw as the Poles rose in revolt under  General Tadeusz 'Bor' Komorowski is universally condemned as the most cynical decision of the Second World War, where Satlin let the Nazis kill of any potential threat to his power in Poland.

The Russians maintain, at least under communist rule, that they had asked the Poles not to revolt because they (the Russians) were too exhausted  and stretched to attack Warsaw. Hence, the decision not to come in aid of the rising had, from their point of view, more to do with saving Russian lives than taking Polish ones. Obviously, this logic cannot matter to Western historians.

The other day, I was watching A Tale of Three Cities: How the U.S. Won World War II, a lecture by David Kennedy. In the Q&A session following his talk, someone asked if Roosevelt’s decision to postpone the second front in Europe in spite of Stalin repeatedly asking for it was not a cynical decision, by which he saved American lives at the cost of many Russian dead. Had UK and USA attacked France in 1943 instead of waiting till 1944, they may have taken many divisions off the eastern front. Kennedy replied that while Roosevelt may had wanted to save American lives, that’s what he was voted into office to do. Hence, he can’t say that Roosevelt was cynical. He was doing his duty as USA’s president.

Well, that logic cannot apply to Stalin, because the Red dictator had no value for Russian lives. Didn’t he send troops to the front without guns or ammunition? Didn’t he gamble with underequipped armies? Did he not kill millions in gulags and by execution? He did. But can’t the Warsaw decision be militarily and morally correct in  spite of all this?

Also, what were Stalin’s choices during the second world war? The Nazis had already shown that they were out to kill Russians, not conquer them. In fact, they killed and enslaved many who welcomed them as liberators from communist dictatorship. So, it is very unlikely that Stalin would have saved lives by letting his forces surrender.

Prof Kennedy made another interesting point during the Q&A. He said that by his estimates, USA supplied around 20% of the martial the Russians used. Now, western historians make it seem as if all the Russians’ material came courtesy Uncle Sam. While that 20% may have been decisive, it wouldn’t have mattered hadn’t the Russians been able to come up with the balance 80%.

It’s not my intention to be an apologist for Stalin and his gang. However, if we want to learn from history, we have to be objective. More importantly, historians must  remember that they are not propagandists.

9% growth… from selling the country

“Rajeev Chandrashekhar, a Rajya Sabha MP and former FICCI president, has pointed out that agriculture has grown at a dismal one per cent and manufacturing at no more than three per cent. The so-called miracle has been achieved through phenomenal growth in mining, real estate, construction.” So says Neelabh Mishra in his article in Outlook, titled The Banana Sheikhs.

Read this with Jagdish Bhagwati’s lecture The Unfinished Reform Agenda. The good professor says nothing about the sources of growth, even while  he rages against Indian novelists being allowed to write on the economy.

When ordinary people cannot see the growth they are supposed to be enjoying, who do they turn to, economists with figures or novelists with facts?

Give North Korea a bad name and blast it

Today’s FT piece by Zbigniew Brzezinski (America and China’s first big test) is typical of what’s out there: North Korea is bombing South Korea without rhyme or reason, because its regime is insane.

But what do the North Koreans say? According to a communiqué published by their state news agency, “The south Korean puppet group perpetrated such reckless military provocation as firing dozens of shells inside the territorial waters of the DPRK side around Yonphyong Islet in the West Sea of Korea from 13:00 on Nov. 23 despite the repeated warnings of the DPRK while staging the war maneuvers for a war of aggression on it codenamed Hoguk, escalating the tension on the Korean Peninsula.

The above-said military provocation is part of its sinister attempt to defend the brigandish ‘northern limit line,’ while frequently infiltrating its naval warships into the territorial waters of the DPRK side under the pretext of ‘intercepting fishing boats.’

The revolutionary armed forces of the DPRK standing guard over the inviolable territorial waters of the country took such decisive military step as reacting to the military provocation of the puppet group with a prompt powerful physical strike…"

For all I know, the North Koreans are lying. But once one reads the communique they don’t seem half as mad as they are being made out to be. My question is why no news source finds it fit to even mention the North Korean rationale, more so because it is readily available on-line. Is there more to this than a communist dynasty gone crazy (Other reports certainly make you suspect it has. Here’s a headline: Kim Jong Il Inspects Newly Built Soy Sauce Shop at Ryongsong)  

They drink urine and burn widows. No wonder they are so poor

In an article Possessions and the Extended Self Russell W. Belk writes, “Another example, perhaps repugnant to Western observers, is the drinking of the urine of Vedic priests to partake of the psychogenic properties of the Amanita muscaria mushroom that these priests ritually consume (Wasson 1972).” In the same article, he writes, “Until outlawed 100 years ago in India, the wife, as ‘property’ of a deceased husband, was expected to join him in death (Bordewich 1986).”

The first sentence implies that Eastern observers may not find the drinking of urine repugnant. Anyway, a little searching shows that Wasson’s conclusion was probably based on a single line, one that merely said that if you drank much soma (And scholars are far from anonymous what soma was), you urinated a lot. The drinking of urine was Wasson’s conjecture. (I invite you to Google the topic. It’s easy.)

And while I don’t know where Bordewich got his data from, I am quite sure it wasn’t from any sane source. The burning of widows accounted for a minuscule number of deaths when it was legal; and it was outlawed in British India in 1823, not 100 years ago (Belk’s article came out in 1988). To say that sati or widow burning was ‘expected’ is to say that white Americans were expected to lynch blacks (I do not mean anything derogatory by ‘white’ or ‘black’) every time they had an unsolved rape on their hands. Neither lynching nor sati was fiction; but that did not make either routine. Anyway, Bordewich wrote in The Atlantic, which is not an academic journal. 

Academics are supposed to be looking for the truth, but when it comes to darkies, who cares? If these people are so poor, ignorant and corrupt, can they be humans like us? No, they must be absolutely irrigational and abnormal. Of course, we need not bother if they outnumber us 3:1 or 4:1 and, hence, whatever they do should to be the norm, not what we do.   

I believe open racism is easier to deal with that this sort of bigotry, which comes out routinely in mainstream media and even in academic literature. Well-meaning Westerners may not recognise the problem: one hardly expects professors, journalists and columnists to be racists, and Easterners dare not write against the pillars of society. For if they do, they show how insecure they are, how afraid of ‘losing face’.

Anyway, I would very much like to do research on this topic, to show if this racism can be objectively exposed, at least as far as academic articles and books go.   

In 1947, India was ahead of China…

Almost every article on the Indian economy reminds us how far behind India is from China.

But how many articles have you seen that note how we lag France, Germany or the Czech Republic? The whole idea is absurd, given that historically (i.e., in the last 200 years) these countries have been so much ahead of India.

Why is comparing India and China ok? Well, both have over 1 billion people – and, far more importantly, India’s per capita income exceeded China’s in 1947 and 1948 when India became free and China became communist, respectively. Hence, the history of modern India begins from 1947; and that of China from 1948.

Do they?

Because drawing back a few decades shows a quite different picture, and shows just how much difference war can make, even to a colonised country. Why is it so easy to forget that, in relative terms the second world war (which began at least 10 years earlier in China than it did in Europe), hit China and India quite differently, and that was bound to reflect on macroeconomic indicators? (Relative is the operative word here; in absolute terms, India probably lost more people to war than the rest of the Commonwealth combined.)    

Hans Rosling’s TEDtalk Asia's rise -- how and when graphically shows exactly what I mean. What’s happening becomes clearer still if one notices how USA and Japan do during and just after the second world war. The former’s growth parallels India’s; the latter’s plight parallels China’s.

I am not suggesting that Indians should take any comfort from these figures. I am, however, suggesting that leads and aberrations do matter. And to deliberately leave them out is a travesty of both economics and history.

(Incidentally, how did Rosling estimate those numbers?) 

Why does the universal become the peculiar in India?

An article in today’s FT (Search for a workable solution by Amy Kazmin) says, “Not every Indian company looks to the state to churn out the skilled manpower it requires. Larsen & Toubro, India’s largest engineering and contracting compnay, tries to bridge the skills gap with seven Construction Skills Training Institutes it runs across India… Yet L&T has struggled to find enough recruits, given the deep disdain for manual labour embedded in Hinduism’s hierarchical caste system. ‘It is not attractive because of the physical content of the job,’ says Mr Jayakumar. ‘There is a social aspect also; this will take time to change.’”

In a country where people carry human excreta for a living, why is Jayakumar feeding this rubbish and why is Kazmin swallowing it?

Anyway, I am yet to hear of any society that (as a whole) prefers manual labour to desk jobs. So why blame Hinduism for something universal?

And is there no chance that L&T’s curriculum or marketing is at fault?

Elsewhere, the article says, “In reality (…) corporate executives have quickly found that progress depends on the attitude of the training centre’s principals – most of whom are risk-averse career civil servants who still report to a sclerotic state bureaucracy.

Ms Gautam acknowledges that ‘there are teething problems’. At her training institute, for example, she has proposed letting hair and beauty students take commercial customers in their training salon, which would generate revenue to cover ongoing expenditure, such as hiring a technician to maintain the centre’s 100 computers. However, the idea has met with fierce resistance. ‘The principals are scared,’ she says. ‘For them, commerce is a very dirty word.’”

Kazmin obviously doesn’t think anything may be learnt by talking to any of those principles. For example, the principle in that particular school may have been reluctant to start commercial activities because that would mean competing with the very parlours that employ her students after they pass out. Or she may be plain lazy and not want any extra work.

Or she may believe, as other academics do, that places of learning should not get into commerce because there are potential conflicts of interest. There is nothing utopian in this. Many businesses would want the status quo and want academics to approve, if not praise, whatever they are doing; yet business as a whole benefits when research breaks the status quo, doesn’t it?

Anyway, why can’t the students simply be apprentices in regular parlours and pay more fees? Doesn’t that happen in many schools, including business schools? Why does the school have to be a shop?

My problem is not with this particular institute, of course, but with this type of one-sided reporting about the Third World, which by giving half or quarter of the picture only harms business. But somehow business likes it, or market forces should have brought in better journalism.

Broken families and rich individuals

In the video RSA Animate - Crises of Capitalism, David Harvey, a Marxist says that the present crisis has everything to do with fall in real income per family in the Western world; in this one, Crisis of Capitalism, The Critique,  someone debunks Harvey by pointing out that income per capita has increased and that the fall in income per family is simply because there are more families now, that is, if a population of 100 were split into 25 families of average size 4 (persons per family) 30 years ago, now that same population is divided into, say, 50 families of average size 2.

I have heard the same explanation from the Kublai Khan of capitalism, Jack Welch.

It looks too easy to be right.

First, where is the data? Let’s say fewer people are getting married in the West these days. Does that also mean that the size or nature of the family unit, on average, has changed drastically?

Second, if the income per family has dropped, why should one not worry about it? Doesn’t the amount a person spends, and saves, depend enormously on whether he or she is in a family?

Just take rent or mortgage. Suppose a family of four spends x by living under one roof (average spend per person = 0.25x); and a pair of divorced parents with the two children living with their mother spend 1.2x (father’s rent = 0.4x; mother and children’s rent = 0.8x; average spend per person = 0.3x, 20% more than the average for a 4-member family). Does that not make a significant difference?

Plus, the mother’s income may be less than her married counterpart’s because she has more on her plate (no-one to share her load with).

The father, on the other hand, may be spending more on conspicuous consumption than his married counterpart does.

In fact, both parents may be spending more on sex (wining, dining, gifting, grooming to entice mates, or straight cash) than they would have had they been in a family, where sex it is essentially a bonus (free gift?) of family life.

And while married parents (or parents who operate as a family in spite of not being married) may save to provide for the future, parents who do not operate as a family may, for financial and psychological reasons, save little.  

I mean, the word income has very different meaning when applied to a person than when it is applied to a company (where it means profit). So why don’t Western commentators take that into account?

Western Democracy?

Salazar, Franco, Mussolini, Zog, Metaxas, Horthy, Piłsudski, Antonescu, Hitler, Dollfuss, Stalin... plus two enormous empires, French and British, with zero rights for darkies and yellows. So what is the democracy we must learn from them? 

Hindus won in India

Subramanium Swamy says here that Hindus did not lose to Muslims because in spite of 1,000 years of Muslim rule, India is still 80% Hindu. He also says Indian heritage is mainly Hindu. 

First, you’d need a very special reading of history to get those 1,ooo years because it forgets all Hindu and Sikh kingdoms existent when the British created their Indian empire. Those 1,000 years should be in mad heads like Zaid Hamid’s and Pravin Tagodia’s. Strangely, it is in almost all our heads’. In this video, a medieval historian repeats it, and I suppose he is typical. I have heard it more times than I can count.

Second, Dr Swamy gets his demographics wrong, which is strange and perhaps not an altogether innocent mistake considering he teaches economics. While my country is 4/5 Hindu, the Indian subcontinent (India + Pakistan + Bangladesh) is 3/5 Muslim. So, Hindus can still be ‘congratulated’, if they must be, but the ‘margin’ doesn’t look so impressive any more.

If we could wish away religion, I wouldn’t care about the margin either ways. We can’t. Also, we cannot wish away the role of religion in shaping our thinking, even if we may be atheists. 

Which means whether it is 4/5 or 3/5 perhaps does matter in understanding ourselves. To use Indian as synonymous for Hindu is not only dangerous but stupid (unless one is doing it deliberately to incite hate).

I would be very surprised if you found only Hindu beliefs if you somehow dag into my mind; and not at all surprised if you found Muslim and Christian beliefs as well.  If our language, clothes, architecture and food were ‘polluted’, should we not expect that our minds were polluted too?

I am not saying Hindu-Muslim bhai-bhai or that the Christian English civilised us or that everyone except Communist historians are communalists . I am saying we Indians have at least three religions in our heads. That’s all.

But do Swamy & Co mean that since Hinduism has been around much longer than Islam and Christianity, India is mainly Hindu? By that logic, Western Europe must look for all answers in Athens and Rome and none in Jerusalem. And Indonesia, Thailand and Cambodia must find their history in Ajodhya. Can they?    

By 2020…

…China’s chairman will chair the world. It’ll overtake USA in this and that. And will be running shuttle services to Jupiter.

Strange, a world mired in economic crisis (It wouldn’t have been a crisis had it been predictable, would it?) is so sure of what China will do by the end of the next decade! Is the media building another bugbear for American politicians to go after, now that the USSR has left us.

TV succeeds where all else fails. Or does it?

In the introduction to Super-Freakonomics there is a section on how TV is rescuing Indian women.

Before they come to the boon of TV they give some statics and quote a couple of anecdotes. Then they inform that most government schemes for women’s uplift to have proved ‘complicated, costly, and, at best, nominally successful’.

So what was successful? TV.

Two American economists, Oster and Jensen, found that out ‘by measuring the changes in different villages based on whether (and when) each village got cable TV’ as the unlikely saviour rolled out over the Indian countryside.

The wording is important. Hence I quote: “The women who recently got cable TV were significantly less willing to tolerate wife-beating, less likely to admit to having a son preference, and more likely to exercise personal autonomy.”

After some speculation on the reasons behind this sea change and the veracity of survey the economists’ initial findings on women’s attitudes was based on, the book continues, “Rural Indian families who got cable TV began to have a lower birth-rate than families without TV. (In a country like India, a lower birth-rate generally means more autonomy for women and fewer health risks.) Families with TV were also more likely to keep their daughters in school, which suggests that girls were seen as more valuable, or at least deserving of equal treatment.”

There are two problems with this story. First, it’s old. We have heard a different version while growing up, in which the transistor radio proves to be the most effective method of family control in otherwise entertainment-starved poor families.

Second, it’s very likely that this research mistakes effect for cause and vice versa. Is it not possible that progressive households and villages got TV sooner than regressive villages? The authors do not tell us if there were attitudinal and behavioural differences before any of those villages had TV, and if being able to afford TV may have been the effect, not the cause, of women’s liberation.

Take a different, but closely related, change. In my generation the Indian educated middle class underwent an enormous population contraction.

I don’t have figures but I do have plenty of anecdotal evidence. Only one piece will suffice for now: My father has seven siblings; my brother and I have seven cousins (from our father’s side).

Now, did TV do that or the fact that my father and his siblings are all college graduates married to college graduates?

For that matter, one wonders if it has ever occurred to any economist to research if TV benefited women in the West as it supposedly did in India?

Just as TV didn’t come to the Indian countryside all at once, it didn’t spread over the West in one shot. The data on launch of TV and women’s development shouldn’t be very hard to find. But would anyone even think of linking them for developed countries?

I admit I haven’t read the original paper, but so wouldn’t most of the readers of the book. In such case, shouldn’t the authors have mentioned that possibility? Doubtlessly it must have occurred to them.

But for the results, it’s a great success

In an article titled Victory in the cold war was a start as well as an ending in Tuesday's FT, Martin Wolf comments on the mixed blessings of the Cold War 'victory'. But the most interesting thing in the article was the graphs below (picked without permission from FT):

A little guessing about the estimated figures (not quite clear from the graph) and back-calculation show up the following figures:

Country	Estimated real GDP in 2010 (1990 = 100)	Growth rate
Poland	200	3.53%
Czech Republic	165	2.54%
Slovak Republic	140	1.70%
Hungary	140	1.70%
Lithuania	140	1.70%
Estonia	100	0.00%
Latvia	100	0.00%
Russia	125	1.12%
Ukraine	105	0.24%
Romania	95	-0.26%
Bulgaria	65	-2.13%

According to Wolf, Poland is the star of this group. If the star's performance is 3½%, one must wonder what standards Wolf and his ilk are using here. European countries don't have growth rates like some emerging economies do, but is 2½% and 1¾% ok by any standards? And ex-communist countries are supposed to be emerging economies, aren't they?  

By the way, this misses out Albania, Belarus, Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo (a country as per USA), Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovakia and Slovenia. Do look up Down in the dumps
in the Economist.

On the wings of nonsense

Picked up a book titled The Elephant and the Dragon and opened a page at random. In just two paragraphs on page 43:

• “J. R. D. Tata supplied the steel needed for India’s post-independence five-year plans.”

Any Indian child knows that most of the steel came from state-owned companies, some built with foreign collaboration. No one company could have supplied the steel for any country’s, even little India’s, five year plans.

• “At Nehru’s request in 1952, he even created India’s first cosmetics company, Lakme, so that women wouldn’t complain that Nehru banned foreign cosmetics from India.”

Most of India’s women are too poor to wear any cosmetics. They best they can hope for are home-made products. And there were small cosmetics companies long before 1952, including Boroline and Afgan Snow.

• “Nehru stayed in power for decades as India became a democracy with one-party rule.”

This is deeply insulting. India was never a one-party country, before or after independence. Nehru, except the one black spot of sacking a Communist government in Kerala, went out of his way to accommodate rivals.

This goes on and on. On page 55, Kamal Nath says China can progress faster because it is authoritarian and can ‘take many shortcuts.’

An example? Well, the author says, ‘China’s Three Gorges Dam inundated 365 towns with water, requiring about 1.2 million people to move, virtually all of it accomplished by government fiat.’ This, she sniggers, couldn’t be done in India.

Think of it this way. The population of Auckland is about 1.3 million. Would it be progress if the New Zealand could order them to move, by fait? If not, at least one Indian, me, is very happy we don’t have progress and shortcuts of that sort.

You can’t develop people by destroying them. The Soviet Block tried for 70 years. We needn’t.

But my problem is that no capitalism will come to India’s rescue on the wings of such nonsense as this.

The author, Robyn Meredith is the Forbes magazine’s specialist on India and China, an award winner, and a ‘1998-9 Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan.’ And this is what she produces. Unfortunately, she’s by no means atypical.

If such is the state of experts, imagine that of the MBAs, Western and, sadly, Indian, who swear by their expertise.

We are doomed.

Why movie stars pay the most tax

The film ads proclaim, “Rs 120 crore collection!” The seats are empty.

What’s up? Yesterday’s Times of India offers hope out of the mystery.

According to an article titled India makes almost as many films as US, Japan & China, an average Indian movie ticket costs $ 0.5 while an average American ticket costs $ 7.2 and a British ticket costs $ 9.5.

Now, Hindi, Tamil and Telgu films collect a good amount from overseas. A few reasonable assumptions and you have:

	Here	US	UK
Per ticket	0.5	7.5	9
Seats per hall	400	150	150
Shows per week	28	28	28
Weeks' stay	4	2	2
No of halls	100	30	20
% filled	15.85%	6.16%	4.25%
Seats filled per show	63	9	6
Tickets sold	4,50,27,370	1,43,630	45,455
$ earned	2,25,13,685	10,77,224	4,09,091
Total in $	2,40,00,000
in Rs	1,20,00,00,000

 

Of course, films are imported elsewhere too. The Middle East must be a big market, at least wherever movies are allowed. And there’s Southeast Asia.

And I refuse to believe that the average ticket price commanded by a big movie in its first few weeks is as low as $ 0.5 (Rs 25). Surely they make much more in the multiplexes.

On the flip side, one wonders if Indian films get 4 shows a day throughout the week outside India. But we don’t need the details now.

The point is that with a weak rupee, a hit rate of1 in 25 should be good enough to turn any movie into a blockbuster, and Indian moviemakers need never look for non-Indian (Chinese, Western) audiences because Indians abroad are enough!

No wonder stars pay the highest taxes: They have so much to spare. The tragedy is that almost everyone else connected to movies – technicians, bit players, ushers - seem to be making a pittance. Why?

If Ahmadinejad won hands down why didn’t he count the votes?

Apparently, Ahmadinejad’s victory in the presidential polls in Iran was a surprise only to Western columnists, who had taken Tehran, the capital, for Iran, the country. While Ahmadinejad isn’t popular in Tehran – and didn’t get votes there – he did well everywhere else.

This fortnight’s Frontline writes, “From the outset, it was only the Western media pundits who were predicting a victory for Mousavi. There was no doubt that he swept the poll in northern Teheran and other affluent suburbs in various Iranian cities. But the majority of Iranians, who continue to be poor, obviously preferred to renew their trust in the incumbent President…

…Most of the pre-election opinion polls conducted since March showed that Ahmadinejad was a clear front runner. The only poll conducted by a Western agency, on behalf of the BBC and the NBC, predicted an 89 per cent voter turnout. The poll conducted by the independent Centre of Public Opinion (CPO), which is backed by the Rockefeller Foundation, a few weeks before the election revealed that Ahmadinejad had a nation-wide advantage of two to one against his closest rival, Mousavi.

In the actual election, the turnout was 85 per cent, with Ahmadinejad getting 66.2 per cent of the votes polled and Mousavi 33.8 per cent. The Western media mainly covered the big rallies addressed by Mousavi in Teheran and other cities. Ahmadinejad criss-crossed the country addressing hundreds of equally well-attended rallies. In the 2005 presidential election, too, Ahmadinejad got almost the same percentage of votes. His rival, Rafsanjani, secured 35 per cent of the votes.”

Some people of Tehran have made the same mistake as Western commentators. They keep asking, “Where’s my vote?” Ahmadinejad’s answer should be: “Your vote’s been counted and your candidate lost.”

Fair enough. Only, it’s not so easy. Because last fortnight’s Frontline wrote, “Mousavi’s camp knew that it would have to fight hard to get as many votes as possible from the 46 million voters that comprise Iran’s electorate. Ahmadinejad was declared winner after only 20 million of the ballots had been counted.”

In other words, Ahmadinejad was declared the winner prematurely. We cannot say whether he had an insurmountable lead unless we know where his opponents stood (at the point when results were declared). Why did their election commission declare the results before counting all the votes, more so because pre-poll surveys showed the result to be a foregone conclusion? Very strange… 

Poor man's business channel

Why isn't there be a TV channel or a newspaper aimed at people who don't play the stock market but are, nevertheless, interested in the economy and business. Particularly, those who don't believe that everything that favours business are 'reforms' and anything that favours poor people is a 'sop'. 

That doesn't mean it'd stay away from the stock market. However, it does mean that analysts will take off their rose tinted spectacles while looking at Dalal St. 

Importantly, it'll have a heavy dose of technology, investigating it's impact on business. Let me take a specific example to explain what I'm getting at. Ambani is considered a great visionary because he gifted us with cross-country phone calls that cost less than a post-card. What is less well remembered is that other operators matched his prices all most immediately. One strongly suspects that the operators already had the technology to provide cheap calls; it's just that they didn't want to pass on the savings to consumers. Ambani had the foresight and the financial muscle to break the cartel, real or imaginary, and all credit to him for that. All the same, let's give technology its due too. 

More importantly, telling people what can be done should encourage them to ask why it's not being done. 

Similarly, we need economists who are not on the right of Ronald Reagen. Again, let me pick an example to explain what good that'd do. Every 'free market' columnist urges the government to close down all government schools, privatise education, and give education coupons or cash handouts to the poor to educate their children. Their pet justification is that the government schools are nothing but a drain on the tax-payers' money. (It helps that income tax-payers rarely send their children to government schools.) 

That read ok till I read Jayati Ghosh's column, titled Services for All, in this fortnight's Frontline. Says she, "It is often pointed out that the quality of education in government schools is poor and occasionally abysmal, but it is rarely noted that this closely tracks the spending per student. The Kendriya Vidyalaya system is run by the government, and there are few complaints about its quality. Yet this is a privileged part of the government school structure, with the cost per child currently in excess of Rs.13,000 per annum. By contrast, most school education in the country is operated on a pittance, of an average of around Rs.600 per student per year. So it is not surprising that there are inadequate facilities and uneven quality of teaching in such schools."

More such hard facts need to be put before us. 

But how would such a poor man's business channel make any money? Should it be a public service channel, run on 'government largesse'? Well, why can't it run like entertainment and sports channels run? On ads for things other than mutual funds?

1 in 8 Hindu males active RSS member

According to this cover story in this week’s India Today (The lotus eaters, Prabhu Chawla, June 18, 2009), “With over 55 million active members spread across the country, the RSS has provided the BJP with an ideological framework and a dedicated workforce to fight and win elections.”

Now, the RSS is overwhelmingly Hindu male.

About 72% of our population is Hindu, and 52% (51.73%) male. So a back-of-the-envelope calculation says 13% of Hindu males – nearly 1 in 8 – are active RSS members. Drop the babies in arms and grandpas and you have an even higher fraction. Really?

Why the surveys were all wrong

Apparently the Congress win in the recent was not predicted by any pre-pool or exit survey. I find that rather difficult to digest. However, let's say that is indeed the case. How can it be possible? Two possibilities come to mind:
All the surveys were badly done. They didn't go for representative samples; instead they just interviewed people near their homes and hotels.

Many seats were decided by the narrowest of margins. This was reflected in the surveys, but was left of by the publications. The newspapers and news channels left out the uncertainty so that the innumerate millions are not confused.

Also, the Congress, because it contested more seats this time (thanks to Ekla Cholo), won more of those marginal seats. A person who calls many tosses is almost sure to win more (numbers, not percentage) than one who calls few.

And, hey, where's the landslide? Congress & Co are 11 short of getting a simple Vote of Confidence. We don't have a hung parliament, but Vajpayee's and Dr Singh's terms show that that doesn't necessarily mean fatal crisis. Let's get real for once.

PS: One thing I heard no commentator talk about was the inordinate length of this election, the consequent presence of central security throughout the country, leading to free and fair (one assumes and hopes) voting. We all agree that corruption is a great ill, yet discuss matters as if it is not even a factor!

Second, I am sure someone has tried to find the role of luck in elections in our country. Very simply, we may look at the correlation between vote shares and seats, after adjusting for state size (In a state with one or two seats, the correlation will probably be weak). Do political parties employ statisticians? Shouldn't they?

Come, steal the vote!

We, the chattering class, are more obsessed with voting than babies are with their navels. Somehow, the act of voting will change everything. Today's Lead India ad in The Times of India reflects this: 
'...you have felt hopelessly outnumbered by another political phenomenon. 
The Great Indian Vote Bank. 
This time however, things have quietly changed. Here's how. 
Sure, every major political party nurtures its own committed vote bank based on case, religion, language and region. 
But since each of them has one, this also makes all of them equal once again. 
So what all parties badly need, and fear most, is that the vote that could go either way and tilt the balance. The swing vote. Which is yours. 
Because the vote banks may make the numbers but the swing votes decide the majority. In 2004 for instance, the winning margins in Mumbai were as low as 10,000 odd votes.'  

The election is decided by the political equivalent of a toss. Come, flip the coin!

Or, worse, vote as the deciding middle-class vote bank, with power totally disproportionate to population (thus denying the majority [the stupid poor in their sin-dripping vote banks] their way?). Do in the poll booth what those tiny parties do in parliament. That you do it without taking a bribe, and that your vote bank is defined by income rather than by creed, caste or language, make all the difference.  

Brilliant! Award-winning! 

By the way, in 2004, the seat was decided by a margin of around 10,000 votes in two of Bombay's six constituencies, North-Central and South. In South-Central, the margin was over 20,000; in North-West and North, they were nearly 50,000; and in North-East, it was nearly a lakh. 

PS: Strange, the chattering class gets so idealistic when it comes to voting and so 'realistic' when it comes to paying income tax!

Dangerous conclusions

I am reading The Bottom Billion by Paul Collier. It, according to The Economist, will be hailed a classic. Maybe it is one already.Blogger is a free blog publishing tool from Google for easily sharing your thoughts with the world. Blogger makes it simple to post text, photos and video onto your personal or team blog.

But I find it illogical and somewhat dangerous.

First, the book is based on the premise that nations can be reduced to numbers. This is an oversimplification so gross that some may find it completely unjustifiable. 

Having taken this premise, the author generalises. Let me take a typical example. While discussing the factors that may affect the 'turnaround of a failed state', he concludes, among other things, that democracy is not one of the factors.

There are two immediately perceptible problems here. First, democracy is an amorphous concept. North Korea calls itself the Democratic Republic of Korea; India is a democracy; and so is the United Kingdom.  

Second, this overall statistic may mean nothing in a particular case. 

Let's go off elsewhere to understand this. 

Let's say we want to know, from data on donors to a charity that funds children's programmes, if a person's place of residence influences his propensity to give. And we come to the conclusion that it doesn't. A citizen of Madras, picked at random, is just as likely to donate as a citizen of Bombay (picked at random too). 

This tells the charity that when, say, it's mailing out appeals, there is no reason to prioritise mailing to any city (or neglect any one). 

Yet the conclusion may be completely wrong on in the particular, where place of residence may be decisive. Let's say you live next to a well-run school for poor children; while I live next to a remand home that is hell on earth. You believe giving money will help run similar schools; I believe anything I give will go into more such hell-holes. You are very likely to give; I am very likely not to. 

Both of us are probably wrong, but that's not the point. The point is that in our cases, residence mattered.

In an ideal world, this detail, and every other, would be known to the fund-raiser, and he'd be able to act with minimal risk. Of course, he has nothing remotely comparable to omniscience, and does the best he can. 

That's probably OK too, because data comes at a price. One has to do a cost-benefit analysis, even if that's intuitive. The 'general' will, at some stage, triumph over the 'particular'.

Now, Collier is not talking about thousands of donors on a mailing list; he is talking about millions of people mired in seemingly hopeless poverty, whose lives can well depend on interventions by Western powers. Is statics of his sort a good tool to decide matters of that magnitude?

"But wait a moment," you'd say, "nowhere does Collier claim that his conclusions will hold in every case. He is simply giving an overall picture. So what's the problem?" 

The problem is that his picture is accessible. It will be used by many, directly or indirectly (by those who know Collier from, say, columnists who quote him), to judge their governments, without going into the details and caveats which, surely, exist in Collier's academic papers.  

So, let's say you are a policy-maker who must decide if a particular third-world country should get badly needed aid. It is at present under an old-fashioned deranged dictator. Further, your government is not particularly bothered about democracy, choosing instead to worry about economic progress. Nonetheless, in this case, you know that nothing will improve unless the poor country gets something that can be logically called a democracy and free press. 

Logically, you should make aid conditional to the dictator's departure. But... you can't. Because, thanks to Collier, everyone knows that democracy doesn't matter. 

Obviously, Collier never drew that conclusion. Inevitably, that conclusion, and similar ones, will be drawn.