Chhota Pegs

On Bordeaux: Tales of the Unexpected from the World’s Greatest Wine Region , edited by SUSAN KEEVIL, with an Introduction by JANE ANSON, Académie du Vin Library (Simon McMurtrie), 2020, 287 pp. ISBN 978-1-913141-05-09 (hardcover). To be published in the Journal of Wine Economics. On Bordeaux is a rambling collection of extracts and articles on “the world’s greatest wine region,” that poetic patch of southwestern France that straddles the Gironde as it nears journey’s end. We are reminded of the special, distinct nature of this terroir from the get-go: the book begins with four testaments to Bordeaux’s delicate yet proud dependence on the “power of the vintage.” The compendium then winds through a litany of interlaced themes: topography, individual châteaux , the aristocracy, Bordeaux personalities, the ravages wrought by Phylloxera , the serendipitous benedictions of Botrytis cinerea , and the uncertainties of global warming. There are the inevitable comparisons: across vintages and a...

Fuji-san on the approach to Narita airport; Debraj Ray (2017) On June 25, 2021, the Sreenidhi Institute of Science and Technology , located in Hyderabad, released the Report of an "Expert Committee," entitled " Open Reviews of the Proof of the Riemann Hypothesis ." The “proof" referred to an unpublished paper by Professor Kumar Eswaran, which claimed to have settled one of the most distinguished open questions in Mathematics, a conjecture stated by Bernhard Riemann in a classic paper written in 1859. As the Preface to the Report states, Eswaran’s contribution “was lying extant on the Internet for nearly four years and had received thousands of reads and downloads but had not received the assent of a mathematical journal to subject it to a detailed peer review." The Committee sought an open review of Eswaran’s paper from 1,200 “eminent mathematicians and scientists." Based on the reports received by the Committee, and its own deliberations, the Commit...

Published in Ideas for India , September 11, 2020. Jean Drèze has recently proposed a "Decentralised Urban Employment and Training" Scheme, or DUET for short. In his words, "DUET could act as a step towards urban employment guarantee." The essential idea is for state governments to issue job stamps to “approved public institutions”, who would use these to pay wages to suitably registered workers. Workers would present job stamps and a work certificate (from the institution) for reimbursement directly into a bank account. I refer you to   Jean's proposal   for more detail. I personally believe that we should push forward with the agenda of employment as a universal right, one that transcends rural versus urban. DUET would move that needle. With the rising tendency to displace labour – a trend that will only be heightened by the pandemic – such a right provides protection, at least to some minimal degree. So I support this proposal. That said, there are many issue...

These are transcribed notes for a short talk on Dipak Banerjee. Dipak babu has had a fundamental impact on my life, not just on my professional career, but also on the way I think. Dipak Banerjee, Mihir Rakshit and Nabendu Sen --- three great professors at Presidency College --- all did research to varying degrees, but first and foremost they were deeply devoted to teaching. In early 1974, I was 16 years old, and had just been granted admission to study at IIT. I was moving close to making a final decision on the IIT campus when I came across Paul Samuelson's book, Economics. It jolted something in me (of course, it must have been present before but perhaps I was not fully aware of it), and it soon became obvious that I was not cut out for an Engineering degree. It would have to be either pure mathematics or a subject with a strong social component. So I decided to take the entrance exam to study Economics at Presidency College, and I also took the ISI entrance exam. At that time, ...

Or, The Case of the Invisible Denominator I've been chatting with Jay Bhattacharya , Professor at the Stanford School of Medicine, and co-author of a very thought-provoking piece on mortality rates under covid-19 . Briefly, these authors study incidence rates in three cases where either a full census of tests was conducted, as in the Italian town of  Vò in Padua, or where a random sample was drawn, as in Iceland. Using incidence rates for covid from these cases, they suggest that the fatality rate for covid is far lower than we think, or fear.   Going beyond these cases, the problem, of course, is a missing denominator: just how many are infected? Assuming we accurately know the deaths from covid-19 --- possibly not , but setting that aside --- the unknown denominator of actual cases moves us along an "isoquant" of fatality rates and contagion rates, which multiply out to the known deaths. The higher the contagion, the lower must be the fatality rate, for some given...