Emergic

Cities are amazing places to live. I for one have lived almost all my life in two of the biggest of them all – Mumbai and New York. Glaeser’s book celebrates cities and discusses what makes cities different and successful. Given that one of India’s biggest challenges is going to be to create new cities to house people moving away from agriculture to manufacturing in the coming books, this book can offer a lot of good inputs.

A brief from Booklist:  “One thing constantly attracts people to one city rather than another — how much housing construction is permitted. Restrictive places, such as New York City, coastal California, and Paris, have a tight housing supply with prices only the wealthy can afford. Hence, middle-class people move to the suburbs or cities like Houston. Other features of metropolises — their incidences of poverty and crime, traffic congestion, quality of schools, and cultural amenities — also figure in Glaeser’s analysis. Whatever the city under discussion, Mumbai or Woodlands, Texas, Glaeser is discerning and independent; for example, he believes that historic preservation isn’t an unalloyed good and that bigger, denser cities militate against global warming. Thought-provoking material for urban-affairs students.”

From a blog post a year ago:

I have been thinking about this idea for some time. The most recent trigger came in an Economic Times op-ed I read a few days ago arguing for an Indian shadow cabinet – like they have in the UK. I think it is a great idea, but I don’t think the Opposition in India will do it.

Given that the Opposition in India (the BJP and the Left) have basically become the Parties of No, there is a need for constructive Opposition where proper alternatives are placed, with the No. That will only happen if there are people who effectively ‘shadow’ the various government portfolios.

India needs an alternative set of policy ideas from the many that are being pursued by the Congress-led UPA government. Can we come up with “India’s Best Opposition” and use the Net to start a discussion on these ideas?

This week’s links:

• The Post-PC era will be a multi platform era: by Horace Dediu. “The very reasons which are driving developers to spread their bets across all and any new platforms should indicate the potential for new platforms and the sustainability of small platforms. The thesis that one dominant platform wins the mobile “war” is naive.”
• Why We Need the New News Environment to be Chaotic: by Clay Shirky: “It isn’t newspapers we should be worrying about, but news, and there are many more ways of getting and reporting the news that we haven’t tried than that we have.”
• Too much information: from The Economist. “Derek Dean and Caroline Webb of McKinsey urge businesses to embrace three principles to deal with data overload: find time to focus, filter out noise and forget about work when you can.”
• You are the Ad: from Technology Review. “Facebook has emerged from a privacy scandal to become online advertising’s next great hope. Its goal: turning us all into marketers.”
• India’s society, China’s state: by Ashok Malik. “India and China can learn from each other’s models. China needs to consider political liberalisation. India needs to reflect on its governance.”

This new book was recommended to me by a friend at our Book Club meeting recently. It doesn’t necessarily have answers on how to eliminate poverty, but provides a framework on how to go about finding solutions. The authors give results of many experiments and field trials done globally to see how the poor make decisions, which can work as inputs for anti-poverty programmes.

From the description: “Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo have pioneered the use of randomized control trials in development economics. Work based on these principles, supervised by the Poverty Action Lab, is being carried out in dozens of countries. Drawing on this and their 15 years of research from Chile to India, Kenya to Indonesia, they have identified wholly new aspects of the behavior of poor people, their needs, and the way that aid or financial investment can affect their lives. Their work defies certain presumptions: that microfinance is a cure-all, that schooling equals learning, that poverty at the level of 99 cents a day is just a more extreme version of the experience any of us have when our income falls uncomfortably low.This important book illuminates how the poor live, and offers all of us an opportunity to think of a world beyond poverty.”

Also see the website – www.pooreconomics.com.

One of the best books on India from the economics and development point of view is Arvind Panagariya’s book, published in 2008. It gives a very good account of why India didn’t develop fast enough after Independence, and then the changes through the 1980s and 1990s that accelerated growth. He also gives an excellent account of the reforms carried out by Vajpayee’s NDA government from 1998-2004.

From the book jacket: “Why did the early promise of the Indian economy not materialize and what led to its eventual turnaround? What policy initiatives have been undertaken in the last twenty years and how do they relate to the upward shift in the growth rate? What must be done to push the growth rate to double-digit levels? To answer these crucial questions, Arvind Panagariya offers a brilliant analysis of India’s economy over the last fifty years–from the promising start in the 1950s, to the near debacle of the 1970s (when India came to be regarded as a “basket case”), to the phenomenal about face of the last two decades. The author illuminates the ways that government policies have promoted economic growth (or, in the case of Indira Gandhi’s policies, economic stagnation), and offers insightful discussions of such key topics as poverty and inequality, tax reform, telecommunications (perhaps the single most important success story), agriculture and transportation, and the government’s role in health, education, and sanitation.”

This book by the former world chess champion is a revelation. The writing, the thinking and the stories that pepper the book — they are outstanding. Atanu recommended the book to me. I had never heard of the book until he told me. I don’t know how I missed the book when it was published in 2007.

The book is about strategy and execution, and not much about chess.  You don’t need to know chess to understand and benefit from the book.

For me, there was an added dimension in reading the book. Kasparov moved to a second career in politics to build a better nation. Something for me to also think about!

This new book by Duncan Watts makes for interesting reading by challenging many of our conventional ideas about common sense. Watt’s previous book, “Six Degrees”, was one I had liked immensely. This book is much more textual and thoughtful, forcing us to think about what we know.

From the book description: “Drawing on the latest scientific research, along with a wealth of historical and contemporary examples, Watts shows how common sense reasoning and history conspire to mislead us into believing that we understand more about the world of human behavior than we do; and in turn, why attempts to predict, manage, or manipulate social and economic systems so often go awry…Only by understanding how and when common sense fails, Watts argues, can we improve how we plan for the future, as well as understand the present—an argument that has important implications in politics, business, and marketing, as well as in science and everyday life.”

This book by William Poundstone came recommended by a friend. I had the author’s earlier book, “Fortune’s Formula,” and had loved it. This book is as good. It discusses various voting systems, and their pros and cons. The book was published in 2008 just around the time of the previous US presidential elections.

Given India’s first-past-the-post system, there are some interesting alternatives that are worth considering — not that they will ever happen!

From a review in the Publisher’s Weekly: “Behind the standard one man-one vote formula lies a labyrinth of bizarre dysfunction, according to this engaging study of the science of voting. America’s system is the least sensible way to vote, argues Poundstone, prone to vote-splitting fiascoes like the 2000 election. Unfortunately, according to the author, a famous impossibility theorem states that no voting procedure can accurately gauge the will of the people without failures and paradoxes. (More optimistically, Poundstone contends that important problems are solved by range voting, in which voters score each candidate independently on a 1–10 scale.)”

From a post a year ago:

 Brainstorming is very useful to get a set of opinions on different issues from a diverse group. I have tried out this format for getting ideas to bubble up from individuals and groups:

• Identity 4-5 key questions that needs to be discussed
• Create a questionnaire which is then given to each individual to answer in about 10 minutes
• Split people up into groups of 6-7 people at a roundtable. Depending on the number of people, work out the number of groups that will be there (call it N). Go around the room asking each person to sequentially say 1,2,3…N. Group all the people with the same number together. This is important to mix people up.
• Ask the group to discuss each of the questions based on the individual responses and come up with a common (consensus) answer to each of the questions. This helps draw out the “wisdom of crowds.”
• One person from each group presents to the wider audience.
• Collect both the individual answers and the group answers.
• After this, there can be an open-house (time permitting).

This process helps distill out both individual thinking and the collective view for each of the issues. It also ensures that each person gets an opportunity to talk (at the group-level). A structured discussion is necessary because a free-for-all format can degenerate into chaos very quickly.

 

This week’s links:

• Kevin Ryan Interview: from WSJ. Kevin runs Gilt Groupe. “Currently valued at $1 billion, the four-year-old business is by some estimates the most valuable U.S. e-commerce company other than Amazon.” See the discussion on the tech bubble in the article.
• The Google Plus 50: by Chris Brogan. “It sparks my attention from several angles: marketing, technology, community, media, mobile, advertising, and more. To that end, I wrote down 50 things to think about with regards to Google+.”
• Gujarat: India’s Guangdong: from The Economist. “Gujarat could be a vision of India’s future, in which manufacturing flourishes, soaking up rural labour.”
• The Weight of Love: from the Indian Express. “Arun Shourie writes about bringing up his son Aditya, afflicted with cerebral palsy for many years now, in his new book, Does He know a mother’s heart? (HarperCollins). Adit’s pain and that of the author’s wife Anita, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease, leads him to ask: how can there be extreme suffering if God exists?”
• Org Charts of Major Tech Companies: Quite hilarious!