Chhota Pegs

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...

Migrants at Bandra Railway Station, Bombay, March 2020. Press Trust of India, On the 24th of March, the Government of India ordered a nationwide lockdown for 21 days as a preventive measure against the coronavirus. The lockdown restricts 1.3 billion people from leaving their home. Transport services are suspended. So are services, factories and educational institutions. The lockdown has generally met with approval from international institutions such as the WHO, and is in line with what is deemed appropriate in economically advanced countries. For instance, Francis Collins, Director of the US National Institutes of Health, writes : “ [W]hat we need most right now to slow the stealthy spread of this new coronavirus is a full implementation of social distancing.”  The framing in these countries is “lives versus economics,” and by and large it is the right one.  As Paul Krugman puts it   ( New York Times April 2), “ most job losses are inevitable, indeed necessary … we...