Month: December 2019

The five most popular posts of 2019

As on 30th December, 2019, these were the most visited pages on Econforeverybody:

 

  1. Complements and substitutes.
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  2. Own price, cross price and income elasticity.
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  3. The Nobel Prize in Economics, 2019.
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  4. Navin Kabra on Game Theory and Blockchain: Notes.
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  5. Launching the One Book a Month Club @ GIPE.

 

Turns out Google sends quite a bit of traffic to the first two posts, when people search for those particular terms online. The Nobel post will of course be an annual feature, and events (Navin’s talk and OBAM) were fairly popular.

About OBAM: we’ve had a bit of a scheduling nightmare with the first book, but we had Ashish Chandra come and talk about Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance a while ago. Links, notes and audio recording will be up shortly. Next up is Vasundhara Sen, with Where India Goes. These will, unfortunately, not be public events, but one target for this year is to turn these into public events eventually. I’ll keep you updated.

Speaking of targets, the usual daily links will continue, of course. But for 2020, the target is to read (in some cases re-read) a book a week and post a review. Fingers crossed.

And some other things in the works besides – but we’ll get to it, eventually.

For now, here’s wishing you and your near and dear ones a very happy new year!

Thanks for reading!

India: Links for 30th December, 2019

  1. On agriculture and Sharad Joshi.
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  2. On water and India.
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  3. Five articles on Kashmir.
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  4. Five on Goa…
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  5. Five on India’s middle class.

Video for Sunday, 29th December 2019

Tweets for 28th December, 2019

Not copping out here, but why excerpt tweets at all. Here’s the tag.

 

Again, hopefully, I’ll get better at this next year.

Etc: Links for 27th December, 2019

  1. Because it contains an article on dying, and an article on pooping. Why not?
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  2. Thanos, Neal Stephenson and Chernobyl.
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  3. Conching and sports, among other things.
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  4. Baader-Meinhoff, jackfruits et al.
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  5. On the animal kingdom.

EC101: Links for 26th December, 2019

  1. On some articles about Baumol’s cost disease.
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  2. A topic that is very, very dear to my heart: teaching economics better, and to younger folks.
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  3. A topic on which I changed my mind this year, and therefore this year ought to count as a success. Props to Murali Neelakantan for helping me do so! On patents.
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  4. Two sets of links about this year’s Nobel. One set is rather informative…
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  5. While the other is more critical.

RoW: Links for 25th December, 2019

  1. A collection of links about Thailand.
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  2. About East Asia, which is a region of the world I continue to be fascinated by – it began with How Asia Works, by Joe Studwell, and has been only accentuated by reading more about it.
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  3. This didn’t work out so well, in retrospect, but one lives in hope. Five articles about Australia.
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  4. Gun control and the USA.
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  5. And East Asia all over again – the 100 books about China is a treasure.

Tech: Links for 24th December, 2019

Beginning today through until the 31st of December, I’ll link to five pieces from each category that I enjoyed collating this year. There’s no science or overt logic to any of them: I’m just going to scroll through the posts, and replug those that I enjoyed re-reading. Hopefully, next year, I’ll get a little more scientific about it. Happy holidays!

  1. Let’s help ourselves understand Stratechery and it’s Aggregators concept.
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  2. I wish the world would get more excited about Oumuamua!
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  3. I hope to be working (from a writing papers viewpoint) on urbanization in the coming year.
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  4. I am an unabashed fan of Google, and it’s products. With some caveats, about which I hope to write in the coming year. But kudos to them for doing what they do, especially in education!
  5. Five great reads from The Ken.

India: Links for 23rd December, 2019

  1. “When it comes to data centre storage though, India lags behind not just the developed world but even Asia-Pacific. With roughly 40 million less Internet users, Europe has more than 12 times its capacity to store data — 8,600 MW, compared to India’s 700 MW. And while India comprises 25% of Asia-Pacific’s Internet users, in 2017, it accounted for only 8.6% of its data centre growth, as per a 2018 research of the Data Center Advisory Group.”
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    A nice article from the Livemint about how this is set to change.
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  2. A short write-up from the Business Standard on reforms to the GST. The specifics do not matter (to me, that is) as the fact that this article needed to be written at all.
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  3. “The remedial measures have to be a combination of factors: capital infusion, capacity building on the supply side to resolve the unproductive assets, incentives for new entrants and tweaks in the regulatory framework. We need to wipe the slate clean and look ahead. The need of the hour is also to take some hard decisions impacting the current stakeholders. Remember, this situation is akin to the housing-led credit crisis in the US, where a turnaround was led by foreclosed properties and those under development.”
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    On revitalizing the real estate sector in our country. It is going to be a long, hard drive, but one that needs to be undertaken as soon as possible. This is necessary reading for anybody who would like to understand India’s economy today!
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  4. Niranjan Rajadhakshya, about nine months ago, on the need (“maybe?” he said then) for Operation Twist.
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    “One option right now is to borrow a trick from the US Federal Reserve—Operation Twist, named after the dancing style that was all the rage in the years after World War II. There have been two famous instances when the US central bank “twisted” a steep yield curve through clever money market operations, first in 1961 and then in 2011. In each case, the Fed changed the relative amounts of short-term and long-term securities in the market. How? It sold the short-term treasuries it had and used the proceeds to buy long-term securities. The result was that short-term interest rates went up while long-term interest rates came down. The yield curve flattened.”
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  5. And we went ahead and did it. However…
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    “Yet it is far from clear that the RBI’s goal will be achieved. Certainly, there might be some flattening of the yield curve. But it is not clear that the amounts being discussed are sufficient. The response of the market for short-term bonds is also being questioned. The sale of the shorter-tenor bonds might well blow up yields in that segment, according to some market participants; on the other hand, liquidity at that end is so ample that there might be an effective cap on yields. The essential problem in the Indian bond market is that the country has, in spite of an apparently manageable debt-to-GDP ratio, entered a state of effective fiscal dominance. “

Video for 22nd December, 2019