Chhota Pegs

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...

Universal basic income, or UBI for those acronymically minded, is in the news these days, along with other brilliant post-modern inventions such as Brexit or Trump. Unlike these other luminaries, though, UBI is a genuinely cool idea: give everyone a basic amount to spend, and let them do what they will with it. They could write poetry, compose sonatas, or study number theory. They could work for more income if they wanted. Or they could relax and do absolutely nothing. UBI is the offspring of a beautiful dream: the liberation of the human being from the drudgery of everyday labor. But it is also the product of a scary thought: the trend of ever-advancing automation, now accelerated many-fold by new deep learning algorithms . You see the connection, of course. If a bunch of creepy robots are going to pass the Turing test at the call center , or drive up shinily when you hail an Über , or stack boxes even as they are energetically prevented from doing so , or even dance while doing ...

I am a big fan of creepy stories. No, I’m not into Stephen King or Dean Koontz or their choleric forerunners: Lovecraft and (alas often) Poe among them. I will take M.R. James though, even though he sits uneasily on the fence between baroque excess and darker understatement. But how not to love “ Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad ”? I’ll take Stoker too (yes, yes, Dracula , but read The Squaw ). Among my all-time favorites, however, are the more nuanced but nevertheless not unusual suspects; say Ambrose Bierce’s " The Boarded Window ," W.W. Jacobs’s " The Monkey’s Paw ," H.H. Munro’s " Shredni Vashtar ," or that great eerie masterpiece by Henry James, The Turn of the Screw . I’ll also take The Little Stranger , a chilling novel by Sarah Waters. So it was with interest that I recently picked up a reissue of Robert Aickman’s oddly described “strange stories,” this one a collection called Cold Hand in Mine . I liked the description “strange stories.”...

It's 4.30 in the morning in Calcutta, and I can't sleep. I can't sleep for a good reason, which is that my few days here are invariably tinged with some jetlag, accentuated by the need to get work done in New York when the Americans are up and about. But this strange late-night early-morning transition has always been part of my life in Calcutta. As a college student, such transitional experiences --- followed by bunking the morning classes --- were an invariable part of my routine. Often it was nerdy: I still associate Lagrangean multipliers with a faint whiff of candle or kerosene. Sometimes friends stayed over, so I associate those nights with the tail-end of intense conversations. Sometimes there was a book. (Recently I found my battered screenplay --- with photos! --- of La Dolce Vita and understood why Anita Ekberg is also associated with humid Calcutta nights.) But it was always half-magical, and if you've done the same (or perhaps even if you haven't), y...

The Times of India recently reported , not without a certain self-congratulatory air, that: "The latest wealth index by New World Wealth that looks at multimillionaires — an individual with net assets of at least $10 million — has ranked India eighth in the global rich list, below countries such as the US, China, Germany and the UK but above Singapore and Canada." This has certainly sent Indian cyberspace into a little tizzy. A common celebratory headline: "India has more multimillionaires than Australia, Russia and France!” And given that the largest number of the world’s poor also live in India , a common admonitory reaction is: "See? Told you so! India is just a corrupt society." This isn't the first time we've been gobsmacked by the sort of numbers India can generate. Recently, farmer suicides did the rounds, with the already large numbers (around 300,000 since 1995) helped along by the Indian numbering system: read here for why some parti...