The Economy

The economist talks about the monetary policy, fiscal policy, Industrial indexes of Production, Purchase, interest rates, global shocks, quantitative easing,...

The common man understands it as the price of petrol, onions, tomatoes, cars, scooters, availability of public transport, non-collapsing bridges/overbridges, trains which run on their given tracks, and the bribes that he pays (or doesn't) to do what he needs to do.

The politician who understands this the best, and achieves ease of doing business for the common man (not just for businesses) would probably achieve great success in coming years. After all, the big buzzwords are of no use unless they ease the pain of an average citizen.

We had a combination of good economics and politics in 1991 with the Narasimha Rao-Manmohan Singh team. Hope that happens once again, and India achieves 10% growth in its GDP, and not just 7%.

Dave Barry- Greatest Hits

Barry has defined a sense of humor as "a measurement of the extent to which we realize that we are trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason. Laughter is how we express the anxiety we feel at this knowledge." His comedy is awesome, and I present a few nuggets from the book Greatest Hits which I am presently reading. ROFL-LMAO humor (I am humouring him with the American spelling of the word).

On making Your Own Beer

Yeast is a wonderful little plant or animal that, despite the fact that it has only one cell, has figured out how to convert sugar to alcohol. This was a far greater accomplishment than anything we can attribute to giant complex multi-celled organisms such as, for example, the Secretary of Transportation.


On Wine

A sommelier is a wine steward, the dignified person who comes up to you at expensive restaurants, hands you the wine list, and says "Excellent choice, sir," when you point to French writing that, translated, says, "Sales Tax Included."

On Wine Snobbery (He is a beer man)

...the slosh-and-sniff approach, where you don't so much DRINK the wine as you frown and then make a thoughtful remark about it as you might make about a job applicant ("I find it ambitious, but somewhat strident.." Or: "It's lucid, yes, but almost Episcopalian in its predictability.").

Laffer Curve (famous in Economics)

What the Laffer curve allegedly showed, when you held it in a certain light, was that if the government reduced everybody's taxes, it would make more money, and the federal budget deficit would go away. I admit that, looking back, this theory sounds even stupider than throwing beverages into Boston Harbour, (the tea party) but, at the time, it had a very strong appeal. 

Yuppies (referring to their ambition from childhood onwards)

What bothers me about the yuppies is, they are destroying the normal social order, which is that people are supposed to start out as wild-eyed radicals, and then gradually, over time, develop gum disease and become conservatives.

Unconventional Wisdom

It has become a trend for economists to write mainstream books like Freakonomics. The latest that I read in this genre is one with a misleading title. I will come to the title later, but the book puts forth a lot of unconventional arguments. One is that patents are bad, another is that firemen should keep the assets that they save from a fire, and yet another is that a high population is good for all of humanity. I will not get into the details (I am not sure that I can!), but it is an engaging way to spend your afternoon, or evening, or night to read this book. In general, his argument is that the law of Karma should be applied to situations to decide who gets the incentives and pays for costs of his actions- the doer!

There are some real gems, like "the Labour minister steals from the farmers and business, the Commerce minister steals from the workers and farmers, and the Agricultural minister steals from the workers and business, to benefit their own constituencies- the workers, the businesses, and the farmers, respectively". Of course, in the American context. But he also points out that people in general have benefited from progress only over the last 50-100 years in terms of a rise in income and choices of lifestyle.

A real good observation is that Americans (or Westerners, in general) have no right to lecture third world countries on issues like child labour, because parents of the children can take care of this, and secondly, because American parents also did the same (supported their children working) for survival a couple of hundred years ago.

All in all, an interesting read. The (misleading) title of the book? More Sex is safer sex.