Source.

America’s problem is the same problem that afflicted the 16th century Spain. When America established its hegemony and set up the world currency system, her leaders installed the U.S. dollar as the reserve currency for the world. America took advantage of this position to export dollars and import goods, rather than to manufacture goods herself. With demand for the dollar as reserve currency pushing up the price of the dollar, local manufacturers lost their ability to compete. Furthermore, China in the past decades has enacted an overt policy of keeping its currency undervalued to encourage exports. This is a violation of trade agreements and should enable the U.S. to take counter measures. But the political leadership has been asleep at the wheel.
Thus instead of Americans earning money via creating manufactured goods that people want, the American government prints money, gives the money to politically favored corporations, bureaucrats, and workers, who then export the dollars in return for cheap HDTV’s.

Source

The way our politics is going these days regional issues are more important, regional parties are taking centre stage...
That's because the quality of our political leaders is going down. Remember when Jawaharlal Nehru was the PM between 1950 and 1962 this country achieved extraordinary growth. Five steel plants were completed, Bhaba Atomic Energy Research Centre was established Tata Institute of Fundamental research became strong, Bhakra Nangal dam came up, IITs, AIIMS, you name it all of that happened in 12 years post independence. You tell me of any other 12 year period where we made such growth in government.
If you have a great leader of the caliber of Nehru even India with all its problems even after independence, with all its lack of resources can make extraordinary progress. Establishing five steel plants is not easy but the man did it. Establishing a centre for atomic energy research is not easy, he did. Getting 400 plus Phds from around the world to IIT Kanpur was not easy, he did it. All of this happened because of the vision of one man.
In fact in 1967 many of my professors at IIT Kanpur said they all came back to India because of the vision and the enthusiasm of Nehru. Today these institutes are not able to attract five such faculties per year but that man attracted 400 such people at just one institute. What does it tell you? It tells you if you have great leaders you can achieve what seems impossible. I am absolutely convinced, as I have written in the book, three fundamental pieces of development — values practiced by people, leaders who serve as a role models and the elite and the powerful who will eschew any asymmetry of benefits. These three pieces of development puzzle are absolutely necessary if India has to make decent, equitable, just fair, growth.


Post the Satyam episode the issue of corporate governance has come to the fore. What do you think should be done to avoid such instances?
Any community that encourages, directly or indirectly, a feudal structure or dictatorship is bound to result in disaster. On the other hand any community (company, city, town, nation etc) that espouses the cause of democracy committed with fair, balanced, transparency and accountability will never see a disaster.
What happened in Satyam is that it was a huge scandal. Nobody could stand up and say, what is happening is wrong. Even those who thought what was happening is wrong did not have the courage and were not in an environment to say that it was wrong.


But lot of companies has a feudal approach...
That's where I think the investors, particularly the institutional investors, have to put pressure on such companies to eschew feudalism and install an enlightened democracy. I believe feudalism was responsible for what happened at Satyam.

Original post
by Elizabeth Kolbert


As Melvin Konner, a psychiatrist and anthropologist at Emory University, points out in “The Evolution of Childhood” (Belknap), one of the defining characteristics of Homo sapiens is its “prolonged juvenile period.” Compared with other apes, humans are “altricial,” which is to say immature at birth. Chimpanzees, for instance, are born with brains half their adult size; the brains of human babies are only a third of their adult size. Chimps reach puberty shortly after they’re weaned; humans take another decade or so. No one knows when exactly in the process of hominid evolution juvenile development began to slow down, but even Homo ergaster, who evolved some 1.8 million years ago, seems to have enjoyed—if that’s the right word—a protracted childhood. It’s often argued by anthropologists that the drawn-out timetable is what made humans human in the first place. It’s the fact that we grow up slowly that makes acquiring language and building complicated social structures possible.

The same trend that appears in human prehistory shows up in history as well. The farther back you look, the faster kids grew up. In medieval Europe, children from seven on were initiated into adult work. Compulsory schooling, introduced in the nineteenth century, pushed back the age of maturity to sixteen or so. By the middle of the twentieth century, college graduation seemed, at least in this country, to be the new dividing line. Now, if Judd Apatow is to be trusted, it’s possible to close in on forty without coming of age.

Evolutionarily speaking, this added delay makes a certain amount of sense. In an increasingly complex and unstable world, it may be adaptive to put off maturity as long as possible. According to this way of thinking, staying forever young means always being ready for the next big thing (whatever that might be).

 The Canon by Natalie Angier:

The largest egg in the world, and thus the largest cell in the world, is the ostrich egg, which measures about eight by five inches and weighs three pounds with its extracellular shell, two pounds without. (Interestingly, the ostrich egg is also the smallest bird egg relative to the size of its mother, amounting to only 1 percent of the female ostrich's body mass.  The she-birds most deserving of every mother's pity are the kiwis and hummingbirds, which lay eggs that are 25 percent as big as they are - the equivalent of a woman giving birth to a thirty-pound baby.

Full article here. By AATISH TASEER.

To understand the Pakistani obsession with India, to get a sense of its special edge—its hysteria—it is necessary to understand the rejection of India, its culture and past, that lies at the heart of the idea of Pakistan. This is not merely an academic question. Pakistan's animus toward India is the cause of both its unwillingness to fight Islamic extremism and its active complicity in undermining the aims of its ostensible ally, the United States.

The idea of Pakistan was first seriously formulated by neither a cleric nor a politician but by a poet. In 1930, Muhammad Iqbal, addressing the All-India Muslim league, made the case for a state in which India's Muslims would realize their "political and ethical essence." Though he was always vague about what the new state would be, he was quite clear about what it would not be: the old pluralistic society of India, with its composite culture.

Iqbal's vision took concrete shape in August 1947. Despite the partition of British India, it had seemed at first that there would be no transfer of populations. But violence erupted, and it quickly became clear that in the new homeland for India's Muslims, there would be no place for its non-Muslim communities. Pakistan and India came into being at the cost of a million lives and the largest migration in history.

This shared experience of carnage and loss is the foundation of the modern relationship between the two countries. In human terms, it meant that each of my parents, my father in Pakistan and my mother in India, grew up around symmetrically violent stories of uprooting and homelessness.

But in Pakistan, the partition had another, deeper meaning. It raised big questions, in cultural and civilizational terms, about what its separation from India would mean.

In the absence of a true national identity, Pakistan defined itself by its opposition to India. It turned its back on all that had been common between Muslims and non-Muslims in the era before partition. Everything came under suspicion, from dress to customs to festivals, marriage rituals and literature. The new country set itself the task of erasing its association with the subcontinent, an association that many came to view as a contamination.

Had this assertion of national identity meant the casting out of something alien or foreign in favor of an organic or homegrown identity, it might have had an empowering effect. What made it self-wounding, even nihilistic, was that Pakistan, by asserting a new Arabized Islamic identity, rejected its own local and regional culture. In trying to turn its back on its shared past with India, Pakistan turned its back on itself.

But there was one problem: India was just across the border, and it was still its composite, pluralistic self, a place where nearly as many Muslims lived as in Pakistan. It was a daily reminder of the past that Pakistan had tried to erase.

Pakistan's existential confusion made itself apparent in the political turmoil of the decades after partition. The state failed to perform a single legal transfer of power; coups were commonplace. And yet, in 1980, my father would still have felt that the partition had not been a mistake, for one critical reason: India, for all its democracy and pluralism, was an economic disaster.

Pakistan had better roads, better cars; Pakistani businesses were thriving; its citizens could take foreign currency abroad. Compared with starving, socialist India, they were on much surer ground. So what if India had democracy? It had brought nothing but drought and famine.

But in the early 1990s, a reversal began to occur in the fortunes of the two countries. The advantage that Pakistan had seemed to enjoy in the years after independence evaporated, as it became clear that the quest to rid itself of its Indian identity had come at a price: the emergence of a new and dangerous brand of Islam.

As India rose, thanks to economic liberalization, Pakistan withered. The country that had begun as a poet's utopia was reduced to ruin and insolvency.

Original here.

a new consciousness arising among the engineering and hacker class; one that is coming to realise that it has not been the artists and the philosophers who have been driving the human race forward toward its destiny. Insofar as they have managed to inspire the hearts of man, it was only to offer distractions and wild flights of fancy. Rather, it has always been the engineer that has been at the heart of progress. And now, after long having been taken for granted, the engineering class is preparing to launch the human race into a new era of change and development. The rate of change in this revolution is to be so blindingly fast that the artistic class will be totally at a loss as to how to frame it. The forms of life that technology is now making possible will be so new and alien, the super-structure of the technology itself so complex – that the stories being told by the artists will soon be seen as old and tattered relics of a bygone age.

Of course, the engineers have been driving innovation for a long time. But there does seem to be some truth to the idea that they passively provided (for some profit, of course) the tools that the artistic class then applied in the pursuit of their inspiration. What perhaps is changing is that with the dawning of this new consciousness, the engineer does not feel like they should hand over the products of their innovation to the artistic class to use in pursuit of their next big idea. Rather, they are possessed of their own vision now – one which makes a ideal of the innovative spirit that has always driven them, and rejects the process of idealisation that governs the artistic.

Excerpt from an article by Joe Keohane. Original here.

And success, as Denrell revealed in an earlier study, is an especially bad teacher. In 2003 he published a paper arguing that when people study success stories exclusively — as many avid devourers of business self-help books do — they come away with a vastly oversimplified idea of what it takes to succeed. This is because success is what economists refer to as a “noisy signal.” It’s chancy, fickle, and composed of so many moving parts that any one is basically meaningless in the context of the real world. By studying what successful ventures have in common (persistence, for instance), people miss the invaluable lessons contained in the far more common experience of failure. They ignore the high likelihood that a company will flop — the base rate — and wind up wildly overestimating the chances of success.

To look at Denrell’s work is to realize the extent to which our judgment can be warped by our bias toward success, even when failure is statistically the default setting for human endeavor. We want to believe success is more probable than it is, that it’s the result of a process we can wrap our heads around. That’s why we’re drawn to prophets, especially the ones who get one big thing right. We want to believe that someone, somewhere can foresee surprising and disruptive change. It means that there is a method to the madness of not just business, but human existence, and that it’s perceptible if you look at it from the right angle. It’s why we take lucky rabbits’ feet into casinos instead of putting our money in a CD, why we quit steady jobs to start risky small businesses. On paper, these too may indeed resemble sucker bets placed by people with bad judgment. But cast in a certain light, they begin to look a lot like hope.