Chhota Pegs

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...

I recently had occasion to revisit Edgar Allan Poe's masterpiece, "The Raven." If you have not read The Raven, you must. Maybe it's meant to be a forlorn lament for Poe's Lost Lenore, but I found it incredibly funny. Here is the first of several verses ( to read the rest, click here ): Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—      While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,      As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. “’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—      Only this and nothing more.” The Raven is written --- wait for it--- in trochaic octameter , with a difficult yet utterly enchanting lilt. David Pearce and I like limericks (and so does Dipankar Dasgupta, in Bengali no less!) but this was something else. Irresistible. So I offer you my attempt at (approximate) trochaic octameter, inspired...

Arrow in 2009 at the San Francisco AEA. For him, the environment was the world's biggest problem. For me it was conflict. We called it quits after a while, and I took this photograph. Professor Kenneth Arrow died on February 21, 2017, at the age of 95. He was widely regarded (along with Paul Samuelson, John Hicks and possibly --- depending on tastes --- John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman and Gary Becker) as one of the greatest economists of the 20th century. He also happened to be my favorite economist of all time.     Professor Dipak Banerjee, my teacher, introduced me to Kenneth Arrow in 1974, who appeared (much in the manner of Hindu goddesses for whom my mother has special reverence ) in the form of a small yellow paperback. I acquired Social Choice and Individual Values from Dasgupta and Co. of College Street , and still have it. I was a first year undergraduate. That little book was a repository of the most profound logical thought. I had never seen anyone distill...

From an email conversation on demonetization with a reporter from the Calcutta Telegraph (Devadeep Purohit) December 28. His story ran January 1 here . There are divergent views on when the impact of demonetization would be over. Are you looking at any timeline?  Well, there are some obvious timelines: Short-run : December 30. I predict that there will be no last-minute  extensions for deposits, simply because an embarrassingly large  fraction of the estimated Rs 16 tr outstanding appears to have come  back, well over Rs 14 tr (and I am sure the number will be far  higher as we get the updated figures).  [Backdrop: The rupee is about 68 to the dollar, and Indian GDP is around Rs 130 tr.]  It's embarrassing because I am sure the government did not want so  much of the outstanding money to obediently come back! Either the  share of black wealth held in cash is small, or people have been very  efficient in using money mules of va...

On February 14, 1990, Voyager 1 turned around from a distance close to 4 billion miles away (which is 40 times as far as the Sun from Earth), and took a last look at us. You see Earth below, next to the red arrow, as a mere pixel suspended in the sunbeam scatter of the photograph. From NASA: " This narrow-angle color image of the Earth, dubbed 'Pale Blue Dot', is a part of the first ever 'portrait' of the solar system taken by Voyager 1. The spacecraft acquired a total of 60 frames for a mosaic of the solar system from a distance of more than 4 billion miles from Earth and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic. From Voyager's great distance Earth is a mere point of light, less than the size of a picture element even in the narrow-angle camera. Earth was a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size. Coincidentally, Earth lies right in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the sun. This blown-up image of the Earth was ta...

by Debraj Ray  ®  Arthur Robson ( For the full Monty, click here ) Many years ago, when Debraj worked at Boston University and his good friend Arthur visited there, we spent one of our many enjoyable lunches together railing against the indignities of alphabetical order, which is the dominant name-ordering convention for publications in economics. A quick perusal of our last names will explain why we railed. To add insult to injury, Debraj had just been enthusiastically recommended a “ wonderful paper ” by Banerjee et al, on which he was a co-author. Alphabetical order is, in many ways, a good arrangement. Our colleagues from other disciplines express wonderment that such a self-centered subspecies — the academic economist — actually uses this civilized convention. Around 85% of two-author papers are written in alphabetical order. Compare this to the cutthroat nature of much of the sciences, in which there is often a tussle for first authorship, while other not-so-su...