Chhota Pegs

There's a story --- here's one of several YouTube videos on this delightful subject --- about how to catch a monkey. You use a jar or an empty coconut shell and fill it with peanuts. Monkey approaches, reaches into jar and clenches its greedy little paw around the peanuts. But it can't pull its full hand out, and what's more, it won't let the peanuts go. End of monkey. How governments in developing countries have wished for similar success when it comes to foreign investment! How India, or Indonesia, or Brazil, or the many countries before them, have hoped that the hard currency could come monkeying in, and then stay, forever enraptured by the goodies that emerging markets have to offer! Alas, it's never worked that way --- or perhaps it temporarily has with foreign direct investment --- but certainly never with foreign portfolio investment. What flows in can flow out, and with high probability it will. You can, of course, impede its flow by imposing exit co...

An earlier version of this article was first posted by me on  Ideas For India , and I have updated the material here with permission. It doesn't stop, and at the rate we're going, it never will. The latest (but not the latest by the time you blink) is the horrific rape of a journalist in Mumbai. Here is a brilliant, passionate article on it, which ends thus: " To the police, the legal system, the political establishment, the men who think women are fair game for rape and the people who foster rapists: what will you do to make sure we’re not violated again and again and again?" That is, indeed, the heart of the matter.  I don't care if the American rape statistics look worse (who knows how to adjust the numbers for reporting anyway?), or if drunk Frenchmen molest Indian women , or if there are lots of decent Indian men . None of this crap matters.  Here is what does matter: one out of n Indian men is a potential molester, a potential rapist. Is 1/ ...

These are quick comments on some of the books currently in my life. As you will see, my reading is a bit haphazard (I was going to say "eclectic," but who am I kidding). Not necessarily the "latest stuff," and almost surely no economics. There is also the problem that I forget very easily what I've just read. I don't forget what's in  the book if I am reminded of it; I just can't remember which books. And that, my dear technophobes, anti-digital elitists and assorted manuscript-wielding Luddites --- that is where electronic reading comes in. For most reading devices also leave an ant-trail of books you've read.   As I write that I realize I'm being slightly hypocritical. As much as I love the real thing --- pages that you can touch, turn, scuff, and smell, I also love the enormous convenience of getting onto a plane with a hundred books and all of this year's New Yorkers. So it's not just the reading log, my frie...

In 1985, after three years of teaching and research in the United States, Jackie and I decided to move back to India and try our hand at living there. Jackie (a.k.a. Devaki Bhaya ), a plant molecular biologist, was the prime architect of this move. I had wonderful colleagues at Stanford, and I was more selfish about my research, so I wasn't as convinced. Nor was my then-employer. ("You can't do this to us...we haven't had the chance to deny you tenure yet!"). But I'm glad Jackie pushed us to move. From being one more boring economic theorist I was transformed into ... well, another boring economic theorist. No, I de-xaggerate: I did get far more interested in real issues, and understood that it's hard to do good economics. But that's another story . I joined as an Associate Professor at the Indian Statistical Institute in New Delhi. The ISI, but not to be confused with its homologue in a neighboring country ! At that time the ISI didn't offer a...

As I explained at in a previous post, the Bhagwati-Sen skirmish is really about two views of economic development. I was wrong, of course. In my beloved India, where all is maya , it is really about Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader and the arrayed forces of Good and Evil they represent: in this case the Congress and the BJP.  Respectively ? I didn't say that. You can flip the order if you want. And as Parakeet Ghost  shows in the following guest article, it probably doesn't matter, except for a kerfuffle here and there.   India’s Reagan Revolution: A Primer by Parakeet Ghost -1- Debraj posted last month about Star Wars  ---  the great debate between Amartya Sen and Jagdish Bhagwati on the future course of India’s economic policy. The Indian media is very excited about this. They see it as an intellectual prequel to next year’s national elections. In this post, I thought I’d fill you in on the political side of things. The battle is between the...