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Showing posts from August, 2020

Digital Disruption and NIIT-isation

- August 30, 2020

The blog has focused in the immediate past on the disruptions in education. The posts on National Education Policy discussed the contours and the likely impact of the new policy on educational disruption. These posts are available here and here . There was also a discussion at certain length on shifting nature of product bundles in education in this post . It is without doubt that education is somewhat ripe for disruption. Yet as everybody awaits education’s own Amazon moment, it is something interesting to find a piece on how Google plans to mark its foray in college education. Google’s aim is to disrupt the college education not just in the US but across the world. Contrary to the education system in India, college system in US has strong barriers of access especially financially thus making many people drop out of the system. They end up without a graduation degree or earn one pretty late in life. The individualistic nature of life in the US also adds to the pressures on t

Tales of Hindu Bravery and the Contemporary Day

- August 28, 2020

Indian historians in recent times have often talked about how Islamic invaders were easily able to conquer India. They also talk about the Islamic supremacy that enabled them to outbeat the Indian rulers who still used primitive methods of warfare. While the Indian rulers used primarily the elephants as their conveyance, their weapons still comprised of bows, arrows, swords or hand to hand combat. On the other hand, the Islamic rulers had got hold of the ammunition and gunpowder technology which enabled them to avoid hand to hand combat thus an advantage over the Hindus. Further it was claimed that cavalry power of the Muslims easily could outperform the Hindu elephant battalions. There is no doubt, there is some truth in the same. The Hindu rulers did not venture into accessing advances in war. They perhaps felt no need of doing so. It was only in the later centuries that the Hindu rulers began to keep pace with the Muslim conquerors. In fact, in 1556, as Hemu marshalled his f

An Amery in the Congress or Night of the Long Knives?

- August 27, 2020

The grand old party of Indian politics the Indian National Congress seems to find no end to the churnings inside and outside. Given the consecutive drubbings it has received in the general elections both in 2014 and 2019, it is not surprising to find those churnings. At the core of the churnings and discontent in the Congress is the Nehru-Gandhi family which has treated it as a family business. As a matter of fact, the ownership of the Congress by the Nehru-Gandhi family is nothing new. It goes back to 1931 when Motilal Nehru was on his deathbed. He was a member of the Congress Working Committee (CWC), the highest policy making body in the party. So were his son Jawaharlal, daughther in law, Kamala, son in law, Ranjit Pandit. Soon they were followed by Motilal’s daughter Vijayalakshmi. The control of the party by the family in many ways is close to nine decades now though it was only in the last fifty years that it was complete domination. The current crisis began immediately

The Political Decisions and the Corona Vaccine

- August 25, 2020

“War is too important to be left to the generals”. This statement is something often talked about and bandied about when discussion arise about international relations. Likewise, the current situation makes it apt to add another adage ‘Pandemic is too important to be left to the doctors”. Without doubt, doctors are the frontline warriors in the battles against the Chinese pandemic that is raging across the globe. It is just not the lives that it has taken that matters but the livelihoods it has disrupted. The light at the end of the tunnel though often comes on the horizon but remains elusive. There is no doubt, patience is wearing thin among the population. Disruption is galore all around. The economic growth is in the negative zone with many economies recording fall in excess of 20% and above. The world is likely to be in recession for more time. The lockdown seems to be generating diminishing returns. It was effective when the disease was confined to few clusters but when it has e

The Economics of Plant and Animal Milk

- August 24, 2020

A couple of days, one chanced upon a tweet by PETA on animal milk and its impact as against the use of plant milk. Implied in the tweet, given the way animals are milked, it would make sense to shift to plant based milk. Without doubt, it sounds quite great in theory. It is well documented on the treatment of animals as they are milked in the industrial farms. In the earlier days, the animals were milked at home. Normally, there would be few cows/buffaloes that would be reared. These would be milked as against the demand for the product. There would of course some amount that was milked for self-use. Yet with passage of time, the demand for milk increased while the agrarian families usually engaged in rearing cattle declined. There was a shift to the urban centres owing to industrialization. The demand for milk in urban centres had to be met by relatively lesser number of agrarian families owning dairy farms thus necessitating the transportation of milk. This invariably led to impro

A Note on Supply-Demand Dynamics

- August 20, 2020

Classical economics or rather its neo-classical variant posits economics revolving around the incentive mechanism. Economic agents are rational and hence their decisions revolve around the marginal cost-marginal benefit analysis. As discussed in the previous posts, economics is all about understanding actions of the agents and the implications of such actions. While economic agents might act in their self-interest, this need not align at all times with the self-interest of the group or the community they belong to. This misalignment might lead to the rise of externalities. Yet, as agents act in their self-interest, it is important to understand the incentive mechanism at work. While people respond to incentives, they also respond to disincentives. There is definitely cost benefit analysis at work when the agents plan their action. This would be however contingent on the price they have to pay for the action. When someone over speeds or travels in the wrong lane or parks their v

Phases in Chinese Economic Structure and Organization Post 1949 Revolution

- August 19, 2020

The events in the last few months induced by the spread of the Chinese virus has brought attention onto the China’s role destructive or otherwise in the global economy. China for long, as many argue, apparently has had a free pass despite it being a non-market economy functioning on mercantilist principles seeking a victory in a zero sum game over the rest of the countries. It is perhaps an antithesis to the rule based order intended to promote global trade, commerce and mobility in a peaceful atmosphere. By opening up multiple fronts, it seeks to intimidate its neighbours, land ad maritime alike. Therefore, it would be of interest to understand the Chinese economic path. An earlier post had sought to link up the current Chinese behaviour through a prism of its behaviour throughout its history. The current post seeks to understand the nature and structure of Chinese economy through a glance at its immediate past. The solutions too would perhaps lie in adjusting the behaviour of the

The Chicken-Egg Conundrum of Economics

- August 16, 2020

Economics as we know it is all about human behaviour. It is about a human response to a stimulus. Economic agents might be organizations or firms or families or collection of individuals etc. but each of these are constituted by humans. In fact, evidence from animal and plant kingdom too demonstrate economics at work in their responses to various stimuli. The response revolves around the self-interest of the economic agent, individual or aggregate. Yet the response manifested in self-interest of the individual economic agent might not essentially translate into aggregate self-interest. These responses to stimuli are studied across the various contexts. An important discussion on this stimulus-response mechanism happens in the context of the markets. Markets are basically the interaction between buyers and sellers. In economics terms, it is about the interface between the supply and demand. Herein lies the question about the determinants of supply and demand and their conseque

Market and Non-Market Streams of Thinking: Some Thoughts

- August 12, 2020

The economic theory and thinking revolves around two poles. One is often termed the economic right borrowing from the political conservatism and secondly the economic left borrowing from those subscribing to the Marxian line of thinking and related to the political left. However, these poles are not water-tight. There is of course however wide streams of thoughts that fall in varying shades of right and left. In fact economic thinking far from being a water-tight compartment operating in silos is actually a spectrum offering shelter to varying streams of thought. These streams of thought give rise to numerous possibilities in understanding human behaviour. Moreover, these streams of thinking offer insights to the complementarities and conflicts between the various modes of thought. Those who subscribe to the spectrum of right wing economic thinking favour the primacy of the markets in allocation of resources. Those who advocate the left stream of thinking normally favour the pr

Is the Monetary Policy Dead?

- August 11, 2020

The recent monetary policy announcement by the RBI governor was not surprising in terms of its actions. It has chosen to retain the key ratios as they are. Further, they have indicated the possibility of a continuing negative growth of the GDP in the remainder part of the financial year. The inflation is relatively higher in CPI terms but low in terms of WPI. Foreign direct investment continues to increase with India currently having the largest quantum of foreign exchange reserves in its history. It would however be pertinent to understand the dynamics of monetary policy at this stage. Monetary policy as noted in earlier posts too, is rooted in stimulating demand and supply through changes in the price of money, the interest rates. Either the policy can point towards interest rate stability which implies continued changes in money supply. Alternatively, if the focus is on stable money supply, interest rates have to keep on changing to achieve the desired money supply target. I

Is the Supply Chain Management Dead?

- August 10, 2020

Browsing through Harvard Business Review, there is an interesting post published titled “ The Death of Supply Chain Management ”. The article makes a radical forecast. It posits the death of the supply chain within the next decade. So the question naturally would be the possible replacement of the same. It argues a smoothly running self regulating utility. Thus it becomes interesting to decode the possible radical propostion being put forth by HBR. After all, it was not too long ago, that people began talking about supply chain management as something of a buzzword. As Li and Fung had demonstrated internet was not even a sine qua non for running an effective supply chain operations. So what has changed is the question that should concern the management experts. There is no doubt, that the company of age of globalization has the supply chain as the heart of its operations. Without doubt, the managers have to base their action on data and this data has to be real time. Furthermor

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