Interesting readings

The
liberal DNA by Pratap Bhanu Mehta in the Indian Express.

Kanika
Datta in the Business Standard on how Narendra Modi is
becoming more accepted.

Ashoka
Mody and Michael Walton interpret India's new willingness to
accept high and unstable inflation.

In continuation of my
posts Activism
and wonkery are the yin and yang
and Law
and order: How to go from outrage to action,
see The power
of populists and naysayers by N. C. Saxena in the Indian
Express.

Spreadsheets
considered harmful.

Bank
for the buck by Ila Patnaik in the Indian
Express.

Nandini
Raghavendra in the Economic Times about the global
success of Indian television shows. Also
see Alessandra
Stanley in the New York Times.

A
finer balance by Ila Patnaik in the Indian
Express.

Nidhi
Nath Srinivas in the Economic Times on the Commodities
Transaction Tax.

All states in India, other than West Bengal, Tripura and Kerala,
had shifted their civil servants into
the New
Pension System. Now Kerala has
moved! Oommen
Chandy, the Chief Minister of Kerala, has been evangelising this.

Quick
fix failures by Pratap Bhanu Mehta in the Indian Express.

An
editorial in the Indian Express on proposals to tax the
rich.

Rajesh
Abraham and Manju AB in the Financial Chronicle on the
rise of rupee trading overseas.

In an interview in the Business
Standard, Percy
Mistry worries about the entry of business families in
banking. We have seen the fit-and-proper process go wrong with
stock exchanges, and must worry that strange characters will now
become banks.

Emre Deliveli writes an interesting blog on Turkish economics as
part of Roubini Global Economics. He
has a
post where he gets struck by a phrase by the Turkish central bank
governor: `short-term capital flows could disrupt price and
financial stability by causing excess volatility in lending and
exchange rates'. As with a lot of what India's RBI says, it sounds
like plausible mumbo jumbo and passes muster in the conventional low
quality economic discourse, but actually betrays a lack of knowledge
of monetary economics.

It has been an impressive set of weeks in the recent past for the
intellectual life in Delhi.

William
Gerrity on Slate on the experience of being attacked by
Chinese hackers.

Sweden is often held up as the model of the welfare state. What is
not widely known is that they are turning away from
this. Read Adrian
Woolridge in the Economist says The streets of
Stockholm are awash with the blood of sacred cows. The think-tanks
are brimful of new ideas.

John McAfee
has an
amazing post about how he penetrated the security of the
government of Belize - and found mind-blowing secrets. Both
elements -- how he broke in, and what he found out -- are
worth pondering.

The US White
House responds
to a petition to Secure resources and funding, and begin
construction of a Death Star by 2016. The cost has been
estimated at 2012 US GDP for 56666 years. But all is not lost. A
mere 500 years at 3% GDP growth will turn this estimated cost of
building Death Star into 2.16% of projected US GDP. The trouble is,
there may
be basic
constraints to the notion of 3% GDP growth for 500 years.

I
decided not
to watch Zero dark thirty.

We knew
that T. gondii
hacks you to change
your risk
aversion. Now we find
that the
flu hacks you to make you more social.

I knew of a driver at MoF who sub-contracted the work of driving to
someone else and kept the difference between the government wage and
the market wage. Here's
a similar
labour arbitrage.

Nicholas Carr
reminds us that to experience life is to break the shackles of the
self.

A great
note by Timothy Burke on the notion of investing in social
network companies, and why facebook has this great proclivity to
go bad on you.

Like Arduino,
the Raspberry
Pi seems to be working
great. Pete
Lomas has a great story in Wired magazine about the
tradeoffs which went into
it. Available
in India
for Rs. 3500. Can
these trigger off a next revolution in knowledge?

In continuation
of the
ipad 2 having more power than the Cray 2,
the computational
capabilities of Curiosity are worse than a typical smartphone
today.

Adam
Gopnik has a beautiful article about Galileo's world,
in New Yorker magazine, that makes us think about our
own.