Month: November 2021

On the Etymology of Risk

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I often like to begin classes on statistics by talking about the etymology of the word average, and it is such a lovely story:

Everybody associated with transporting goods by sea had to deal with the chance that only a part of the consignment would actually reach the intended destination. There was always the chance that a part of the consignment would go bad, or needed to be jettisoned, or some such. Who bears the loss of this part of the total consignment? Should it be the sending merchant, the receiving merchant or should it be the captain of the ship?

Thus, when for the safety of a ship in distress any destruction of property is incurred, either by cutting away the masts, throwing goods overboard, or in other ways, all persons who have goods on board or property in the ship (or the insurers) contribute to the loss according to their average, that is, according to the proportionate value of the goods of each on board. [Century Dictionary]

https://www.etymonline.com/word/average

The latter half of that excerpt above is nothing but “sigma x by n” – the total losses divided by the number of people involved. This, of course, is nothing but the formula for average. But the word itself comes from the word loss, but in Arabic – awargi, or awariya. Or as I like to tell my students, you’re really speaking Arabic when you’re saying “average”.

Psyche.co has a lovely essay on both the etymology of, and the emergence of the concept of, risk. Authored by Karla Mallette, it is a lovely little rumination on both the meaning of the word, and how it has evolved over time.

The first known usage of the Latin word resicum – cognate and distant ancestor of the English risk – occurs in a notary contract recorded in Genoa on 26 April 1156. The captain of a ship contracts with an investor to travel to Valencia with the sum invested. The contract allocates the ‘resicum’ to the investor.

https://psyche.co/ideas/how-12th-century-genoese-merchants-invented-the-idea-of-risk

This is entirely speculative on my part, because I know next to nothing about Latin, but a simple Google search for the meaning/etymology of resicum tells me that it means “that which cuts, rock, crag”. If one agrees with the notion that ship voyages at the time must have been fraught with risk, then the etymology of risk begins to make eminent sense – the entirety of the prospective profit from such a voyage can end up being cut down to zero. One could earn all of it, or one could get none of it – that, of course, is the risk involved in such a structure.

The essay remains of interest beyond just this point:

Before the innovation of the resicum, captain and crew took on the risks of the journey alone: only they would shoulder the burdens (and pocket the profits). But resicum shared out potential profit and loss among a broader community. It put a number on contingency, and in so doing it rationalised risk.

https://psyche.co/ideas/how-12th-century-genoese-merchants-invented-the-idea-of-risk

In this context, one needs to realize that the author is talking not about the original meaning of the word resicum. Rather, she is implying that resicum has a modern, institutional meaning now – the idea that resicum (or risk) is being diversified. The captain doesn’t bear the risk alone, although he does bear part of it (typically 25% in those times). Somewhat analogous to what we could call sweat equity these days, I suppose. The rest of the risk, or resicum, is parcelled out to investors who are willing to stump up the cost of the voyage. If the captain comes back empty handed, they lose their investment. If the captain comes back from the voyage, his ship laden with precious cargo, then the investors reap the benefits of having funded the voyage.

This arrangement was called resicum, and it seems to have meant an arrangement which had the ability (but not the guarantee) to provide sustenance.

Historians believe that resicum derived from an Arabic word, al-rizq. The Arabic rizq is Quranic. It refers to God’s provision for creation. This verse, for instance, uses the noun and a verb derived from the same lexical root, and refers to the sustenance that God provides for all of creation: ‘And how many a creature does not carry its own provision [rizq]! God provides for them and for you: he is the All-Hearing, the All-Knowing.’ During the Middle Ages, the word was used to name the daily subsistence pay given to soldiers. In the dialect of al-Andalus (Arab Spain), it referred to chance or good fortune. Rizq, it seems, bounced from port to port around the Mediterranean, until it landed on the worktable of a scribe in Genoa recording a strategy used to share out the risk of trans-Mediterranean trading ventures by betting against catastrophe.

https://psyche.co/ideas/how-12th-century-genoese-merchants-invented-the-idea-of-risk

So from providing for, to meaning good fortune, to our modern understanding of the word risk, the word has been on quite a journey, and is in fact a good way to understand all of what risk means.

A little postscript: I came across this article via The Browser. And second, if you haven’t read it, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by Peter Bernstein is a good introductory book to read about the topic.

The Economist on Year Three of the Pandemic

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(Note: this was written and scheduled for posting before the world found out about Omicron. I have not changed a single word, except for the two sentences in these brackets)

‘Tis that time of the year, and we will soon be inundated with reflections on the year gone by, and the year to come. The Economist has come up with its list, and today, we will be focusing on one from among this series: What To Expect in Year Three of the Pandemic.

  1. The key takeaway is that the world as a whole will be better off because of the vaccines that become widely available in 2021, but…
  2. Vaccine inequity, already unfortunately visible, will become starker still. And this will have obvious ramifications on health (that much is obvious), but also on economic outcomes.
    “A disparity of outcomes between rich and poor countries will emerge. The Gates Foundation, one of the world’s largest charities, predicts that average incomes will return to their pre-pandemic levels in 90% of advanced economies, compared with only a third of low- and middle-income economies.”
  3. Distribution difficulties and vaccine hesitancy will also play (unfortunate) roles in the continuing saga, and a glut (imagine!) is not impossible to imagine in late 2022
  4. This is a chart well worth staring at. I encourage you to stare at it:

5. Vaccines will become better, more broad based, and supply chains will ease out in part because of technological advancements, such as freeze-dried mRNA vaccines.

6. But the larger point that I personally take away from the article is this: it’s going to be better, the article says than both 2020 and 2021, but it won’t be over in 2022. Variants will emerge, hesitancy will remain, and inequity will persist.
There will be, in other words, progress, but not as much as one would have liked, not as fast as one would have liked, and with complications that are bound to emerge, but impossible to currently specify.
Better, in short, but not by much, and with real risks to boost.

7. But all that being said, given the year that went by, I suppose we should take what we get.

Joanna Stern, Trapped in the Metaverse

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What might a day – literally twenty-four hours – in the metaverse look like?

So far, on the basis of this video, ’tis not for me!

India and China’s GDP Components Over Time

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This should go without saying, but ask yourself if you are able to recreate these charts given the data sources mentioned in the tweet. You needn’t use DataWrapper necessarily (although if you’re considering journalism or a related field, learning it will help) – but do see if you can create the chart!

Tim Harford on The Ease of Doing Business Report

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But before anything else, let’s take a moment to acknowledge the title of the article – if you haven’t seen the movie, please do. One of my favorite Judie Dench movies.

You may have heard of the problems associated with the Ease of Doing Business report. (The reason I have linked to the Wikipedia page rather than the original page is because it wasn’t opening for me. Your mileage may vary.)

Even a spreadsheet can become a victim of its own success. Just ask the World Bank’s Doing Business report. While many worthy publications from the World Bank are never downloaded, Doing Business has been a smash hit for years. No longer. Amid an ugly scandal about data manipulation that has left the head of the IMF, Kristalina Georgieva, fighting for her career, Doing Business has been cancelled.
The power struggle at the top of the fund involves: a three-way tussle for influence between the US, Europe and China; rivalry between Georgieva, former chief executive at the World Bank, and the current, Trump-nominated bank president David Malpass; and domestic US politics. (Democrats have long disliked the Doing Business report’s low-regulation tone.)
The accusation is that in 2017 the World Bank’s leadership, including Georgieva, pressured the Doing Business team to improve China’s ranking in order to keep the Chinese government happy. The case for the defence is that Georgieva’s team were merely double-checking a sensitive number, that China’s ranking barely moved (from 85th to 78th), and anyway China is now ranked far better (25th) than when Georgieva was at the bank. The fight is as fascinating as it is unedifying.

https://timharford.com/2021/11/notes-on-a-statistical-scandal/

By the way, if you want to learn how to write columns well, you could do a lot worse than reading these three paragraphs.

A short, interesting sentence to begin the column, followed by an easy to read first paragraph that explains what the problem is. The next two paragraphs provide context, give additional details, and bring the reader up to speed, so that Tim Harford can get to the points that he wants to make regarding the whole issue. And contrast that with what I have managed to do so far: four paragraphs, one lengthy excerpt, and two tangential points, one of which is meta. Ah well.

But all of that aside, take some time out to read Tim Harford’s column before reading what follows.

  1. What was the report optimizing for?

    Originally, it seems to have been an attempt to help interested entities understand how easy (or not) it was to do business in a particular country. This helps entrepreneurs (domestic and international) understand some of the potential impediments to starting a business. The report lays out the processes involved in starting a business, and speaks about the length of time required to complete those process. That is surely a good thing, correct?
  2. Is a report not the same as a ranking?

    What matters more to you as a student when it comes to examinations? Are examinations a way for you to reflect upon how much you’ve learnt and what remains to be learnt, or are examinations a way to understand where you are in the pecking order? The problem with the Ease of Doing Business report wasn’t the report itself, it was the rankings that were generated on the basis of the reports.
    As Tim Harford says in his column: “But Klein has one regret: the original decision to publish an overall ranking of which countries were the best and the worst in the world for doing business. Such aggregate rankings make little sense, but they are ubiquitous because they are clickbait. The Doing Business aggregate ranking was no exception. Without it, the report would never have received so much attention. But without the ranking, it is doubtful anyone would have cared enough to try to manipulate the data.”
    And of course the inevitable followed: the rankings became more important than the report itself.
  3. A rare point of disagreement. Here is the quote from his column: “This newspaper recently celebrated the demise of the Doing Business indicators, complaining that countries were “expressly changing policies to score better”. That is a strange objection. Unless the indicators are valueless, when countries try to score better that is a feature, not a bug.”

    When Tim Harford says “this newspaper”, he is referring to the Financial Times, where he happens to be a columnist. I’m unable to access the original FT article from where this point was excerpted, but I happen to agree with excerpt above, and therefore disagree with Tim Harford. That being said, I certainly do wish that the original FT article had been worded better in the case of the sentence that we’re able to read.
    Think about that phrase up above: ““expressly changing policies to score better”.
    I think what they wanted to say was this: countries should ideally have been trying to figure out how to change policies so that in reality, on the ground, it became easier to do business. This should then have been reflected in the rankings. That would have been Utopian. Instead, policymakers and politicians in some cases tried to change the policies so that the ranking improved, without there being much change on the ground. That word, “expressly”, is doing a lot of lifting in that phrase – because all of what I have written is what I think they were trying to get at.
    Put another way, the indicators are not valueless, unless they’ve become the target. And that, really, is all that the FT was trying to say: the indicators did, in fact, become the target. Countries were more focused on the outcome (the ranking) rather than the process (has it actually become easier to do business?), and that is never a good idea.
  4. Consider this quote: “The Doing Business aggregate ranking was no exception. Without it, the report would never have received so much attention. But without the ranking, it is doubtful anyone would have cared enough to try to manipulate the data.”

    It is a question we should all be asking ourselves repeatedly: what are you optimizing for?
    In this case, was the World Bank optimizing for drawing attention to the report? We live in a world in which signaling matters, Goodhart’s Law is real and status is the name of the game. So if the World Bank was optimizing for publicity, it should have acknowledged that all of what eventually happened was a very real risk.
    But if the World Bank was optimizing for preparing a good report that stood up to scrutiny, then it should have acknowledged that the opportunity cost of such a strategy is that hardly anybody would ever read it. But such, alas, is life.

“What Are You Optimizing For?”, The International Macro Edition

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It is one of my favorite questions to ask whenever students come to me with doubts about “what to do next” in terms of either further education or a job.

(Side note: asking me what to do next probably isn’t a good idea, because my career has been gloriously unplanned. But that’s a whole separate story)

But one should be clear about what one is optimizing for: is it income, or free time, or job satisfaction, or rapid career growth – or something else altogether? And whatever it may be, optimizing for one will quite probably mean having to give up on some or all of the others.

And this applies to many more things than just the What To Do Next question, of course. In fact, relentlessly asking this question in many different contexts can take you a very long way in terms of understanding what seem like really difficult and complex topics.

Such as, for example, what China has been up to in terms of international trade, and what went so gloriously wrong.

The simple story of international trade (or trade in general for that matter) isn’t difficult to grasp. Bear in mind that reality is a little more complex, but it really boils down to comparative advantage.

As Michael Pettis points out at the start of this excellent Twitter thread, the so-called “China shock” *is* a shock, but it is not an indictment of the basic concept of international trade. China, as we’re about to find out, was playing a zero-sum game.

One of the most glorious things about economics is the fact that trade is a non-zero sum game. Both parties that have voluntarily entered into a trade with one another benefit for the trade having gone through, and so nobody loses. This is as true at your local chai tapri (you give ten bucks for a cup of chai, and both you and the chaiwala are happy with the trade) as it is in the context of international trade between the United States of America and China.

But beware overly simplistic stories, for they can trip up many a happy ending:

Isabella Kaminska, in an old but excellent article on FT Alphaville made a very similar point. I’ll get to that point in a bit, but may I also use this opportunity to urge the good folks at FT to make FT Alphaville free again?

Here’s the point from that old article:

What those who accused China of using its exchange rate to gain advantage probably misunderstood was that it wasn’t the currency which was being undervalued, it was the people. Stephen Roach, then chief economist of Morgan Stanley, explained this point in the Financial Times in 2003 (our emphasis):
“The Chinese phenomenon hardly amounts to grabbing market share from the rest of the world. It is more a by-product of the struggle for competitive survival by high-cost producers in the industrial world. Last year, a record $53bn of foreign direct investment flowed into China, making the country the largest recipient of such funds in the world.
These investments did not occur under coercion. A high-cost industrial world has made a decision that it needs China-based outsourcing to ensure competitive survival. Dismantling China’s currency peg would destabilise the very supply chain that has become so integral to new globalised production models in Japan, the US and Europe.
There are several other reasons why China should leave its currency unchanged. Contrary to widespread perception, China does not compete on the basis of an undervalued currency. It competes mainly in terms of labour costs, technology, quality control, infrastructure and an unwavering commitment to reform.

https://www.ft.com/content/d11a4c5e-d5fb-32f4-a606-e64d1483cea1 (Emphasis added)

This article was written in 2015, but it holds up very well. In fact, it is instructive to see how, in addition to labour costs and infrastructure, China has now centralized under government authority technology as well. It is also instructive to think about how (and in what direction) the “unwavering commitment to reform” has evolved, but that is a separate story.

To come back to the common thread between the old FT Alphaville article and the Twitter thread by Michael Pettis:

Stephen Roach, in 2003, spoke about how China was undervaluing its people. Isabella Kaminska in 2015 spoke about China competes (at least in part) on labor. And Michael Pettis in 2021 is talking about China competing by suppressing its wages (relative to productivity levels). But they’re all making the same point, and it is a point that merits greater emphasis:

The China shock needn’t have been a shock, in the sense that it is not as if economic theory stopped working once China started trading more with the rest of the world.

China, as it turns out, wasn’t optimizing for international trade. China was – and is – optimizing for an increase in her exports, and that over time.

That problem manifests itself in many different ways: The USA’s persistent trade deficit with China is just one glaring example. The Belt and Road Initiative is another (what the hell do you do with all those forex reserves, dammit?). And there’s many, many more.

But as Michael Pettis reminds us in this thread, the “China Shock” phenomenon becomes way more comprehensible when you ask a deceptively simple question: what is China optimizing for?

What is India optimizing for when it comes to international trade? What should India be optimizing for? In both cases, whatever your answer, why?

Critique this blogpost, and write your responses to the questions above. It is a great way to test yourself if you think you’re good to go in open macroeconomics or international trade.

Bibek Debroy on loopholes in the CPC

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That’s the Civil Procedure Code.

The average person will not have heard of Dipali Biswas or Nirmalendu Mukherjee and may not be aware of the case decided by the Supreme Court on October 5, 2021. The case was decided by a division bench, consisting of Hemant Gupta and V Ramasubramanian and the judgment was authored by Justice V Ramasubramanian. Justice Ramasubramanian observed (not part of the judgment), “Not to be put off by repeated failures, the appellants herein, like the tireless Vikramaditya, who made repeated attempts to capture Betal, started the present round and hopefully the final round.” Other than smiling about a case that took 50 years to be resolved and making wisecracks about “tareekh pe tareekh”, shouldn’t we be concerned about rules and procedures (all in the name of natural justice) that permit a travesty of justice?

https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/civil-procedure-code-loopholes-justice-delay-7617291/

I know (alas) next to nothing about the law, but there were two excerpts in this article that I wanted to highlight as a student of statistics and economics. We’ll go with statistics first.

Whenever I start to teach a new course, I always tell my students that there are two kinds of errors I can make. I can either make sure that I complete the syllabus, irrespective of whether everybody has understood it or not. Or I can make sure that everybody has understood whatever I have taught, irrespective of whether the syllabus is completed or not. Speed versus thoroughness, if you will – and both cannot be optimized for at the same time. If you’re wondering, I prefer to err on the side of making sure everybody has understood, even if it comes at the cost of an incomplete syllabus.

This is, of course, closely related to formulating the null hypothesis and asking which type of error one would rather avoid. And the reason I bring it up, is because of this exceprt:

Innumerable judgments have quoted the maxim, “justice hurried is justice buried”. By the same token, justice tarried is also justice buried and inordinate delays mean the legal system doesn’t provide adequate deterrence to mala fide action. In my view, for most civil cases, the moment issues are framed, one can predict the outcome within a range, with a reasonable degree of certainty. (Obviously, I don’t mean constitutional cases before the Supreme Court.) With no disrespect to the legal system, I think AI (artificial intelligence) is capable of delivering judgments in such cases, freeing court time for non-trivial cases.

https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/civil-procedure-code-loopholes-justice-delay-7617291/

“Justice hurried is justice buried” and “Justice tarried is justice buried” are both problems, and optimizing for one means not optimizing for the other. What Bibek Debroy is saying here is that what we have ended up choosing to optimize for the former. We make sure that every case has the opportunity to be heard at great length, and with sufficient maneuvering room for both parties.

And that’s great, but the opportunity cost is the fact that sometimes judgments can take over fifty years (and counting!).

And what is Bibek Debroy’s solution? When he suggests that AI is capable of delivering judgments in such cases, he is not saying that the AI will give a perfect judgment every time. He is not even saying that one should use AI (I think the point is rhetorical, although of course I could be wrong). He is saying that the gains in efficiency are worth the occasional case being incorrectly judged. In other words, he is optimizing for justice tarried is also justice buried – he would rather avoid the error of taking up too much time for each case, and would (presumably) be fine paying the price of having the occasional case being misjudged.

It is up to you to agree or disagree with him, or with me when it comes to how I conduct classes. But all of us should be cognizant of the opportunity costs when we decide which error we’d rather avoid!

And economics second:

Litigants and lawyers (at least on one side of a civil case) have no incentive to finish a case fast (Does the judiciary have it?).

https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/civil-procedure-code-loopholes-justice-delay-7617291/

This is more of a question (or rumination) on my part – what are the incentives of the judiciary? I can imagine scenarios in which those “on one side of a civil case” can use both official rules and underhanded stratagems to delay the eventual judgment. And since there is no incentivization in terms of speedier resolutions, are we just left with a system that is geared towards moving along ponderously forever more?

And if so, how might this be changed for the better? This is, and I’m not joking, (more than) a trillion dollar question.

And finally, as a bonus, culture:

My friend Murali Neelakantan makes the point here that isn’t really about incentive design at all, that the problem is more rooted in how we, the people of India, use and abuse the provisions of the CPC.

That takes me into even deeper and ever more unfamiliar waters, so I shall think more about this before trying to write about it!

The Economics of Standardization and USB-C

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There is a lovely story, and you may have heard it before, about why CD’s are of a particular length:

Both Sony and Philips knew that the legendary conductor Herbert Von Karajan would be instrumental to the success of their new format. He had agreed to endorse the CD at the Vienna press conference where they would announce the company’s prototype.
But he had one condition: that the new technology could allow listeners to hear the whole of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony without interruption.
The longest recording Sony could find was Wilhelm Furtwängler’s glacial 1951 recording which ran to a length of – you’ve guessed it – 74 minutes.

https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/why-is-a-cd-74-minutes/

Read the entire article, it is a short read about how CD’s came to be of a particular length, but more importantly, it also speaks about the forces of competition, regulation and signaling also played important roles in the length of the modern compact disc.

Of course, this wasn’t the first time that the consumer electronics industry went through something like this (and I guarantee you it won’t be the last):

The videotape format war was a period of competition or “format war” of incompatible models of consumer-level analog video videocassette and video cassette recorders (VCR) in the late 1970s and the 1980s, mainly involving the Betamax and Video Home System (VHS) formats. VHS ultimately emerged as the preeminent format.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war

And that brings us, in roundabout fashion, to the modern equivalent of these two episodes: Micro-USB vs Lightning Cables vs USB-C. And if you find yourself wondering (as I often do) why the world doesn’t just move to USB-C across all devices and firms – well, its complicated:

The reason USB-C can be complicated is that we have one plug that does multiple things — from low power to ridiculously high 240-watt power. From basic data to super high-speed data. Thunderbolt. Display monitors. Audio. The dream of a single cable and plug is great, but it’s also confusing.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/9/22772024/vergecast-podcast-usb-c-future

There isn’t, as some of you might know already, just one type of USB-C cable. There’s at least seven, and in reality, many more:

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/30/22702453/usb-c-pd-240-watt-charging-usb4-data-transfer-logo-branding-standard

Standardization matters. Anybody who’s traveled across international borders knows this, beginning with the adapters that you plug into walls. But this is also true of light-bulbs, laptop chargers, and so many other things besides. USB-C is, infortunately, a good example of why standardization matters, and what happens when the market fails to simplify it enough.

You might enjoy listening to this podcast for a somewhat maddening lesson in how things didn’t quite go according to plan when it came to the evolution of USB-C as a standard.

Update: Pranay pointed me to this edition of their excellent newsletter (you really should subscribe if you haven’t already!), in which they explain why regulating standardization is problematic. You’ll have to scroll towards the end of this edition:

So, as we dive deeper, the shine of promised benefits gets dulled by the impact of probable costs. Other solutions such as unbundling chargers and phones seem to have a better cost-benefit trade-off.
Beware of intuitive solutions to complex policy problems.

https://publicpolicy.substack.com/p/144-yeh-democracy-hai-aur-yahan-hamari

My takeaway is that the problem is even more complicated than my post made it out to be, alas.

V Ananta Nageswaran on the IMF’s Medium-Term Forecasts for India and China

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If you are an undergrad or post-grad student in India studying economics, you’ve no doubt been taught how to think about GDP (ways to measure it, ways to define it, its limitations, its advantages). But if you ask me, what we fail to do enough of is explain to students how one is supposed to use these concepts.

I often tell my students that GDP for a nation is like grades/marks obtained by a student. In much the same way that grades are not an accurate reflection of all of what a student has done in an academic year (even in purely an academic sense), GDP isn’t an accurate reflection of what a country has earned in a given time period. But also in much the same way that we have not been able to come up with a better way to assess students, we have not been able to come up with a better way to measure the economic output of a nation.

So while keeping in mind the fact that the measure isn’t perfect, but also that there isn’t a better measure in place just yet, let’s go ahead and read V Ananta Nageswaran’s excellent column in the Livemint about India and China’s medium term forecasts by the IMF.

What I am going to do below is highlight some sentences from this column and pose questions on the basis of these excerpts. Try and answer these questions, especially if you have been taught macro in your college/university. To my mind, this will go a very long way towards helping you understand if you have, well, understood key macroeconomic concepts:

  1. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) publishes its World Economic Outlook (WEO) twice a year after its Spring and Autumn meetings.

    Have you read the latest edition? If nothing else, take a look at the executive summary.
  2. “However, since then, many private-sector economists have upgraded their forecast for India’s economic growth this financial year to more than 10%, based on more recent and real-time indicators including mobility data.”

    What might a list of such indicators look like? Here’s a place to get started.
  3. “In October, India’s nominal GDP for 2026-27 was projected at ₹392.84 trillion and $4.393 trillion. In the April WEO edition, the corresponding forecasts were ₹389.01 trillion and $4.534 trillion. So, secondary-school arithmetic will tell us that the Fund has become relatively more pessimistic on the Indian rupee versus US dollar (USD) in October than in April. From 70.9 in 2020-21, the Fund sees the rupee depreciating to 89.4 against the US dollar by 2026-27. In April, the implied exchange rate forecast for 2026-27 was 85.8. So, the US dollar is stronger by 4.2% at the end of 2026-27 as per the October 2021 forecast versus April’s. The effect is that India’s nominal GDP in USD terms in 2026-27 is $140 billion lower than the April forecast.”

    Can you go back to the report and find out how the author reached these numbers? Do you agree with his calculations? Can you explain these calculations to somebody else? Do you find yourself able to write paragraphs like these? If not, what do you think you need to learn?
  4. “When it comes to forecasting exchange rates, the literature informs us that economic fundamentals do a poor job for any horizon under three years.”

    What might this mean in terms of statistical concepts? What does this tell you about how to think about long term investing (in financial assets, people and entire nations)?
  5. “Of all the economic fundamentals that influence exchange rates, the one enduring factor is the inflation differential.”

    Which are the other economic fundamentals that influence exchange rates? What is the inflation differential? Why does the author say that this particular factor is an enduring one?
  6. This is a truly remarkable graph, and worthy of thinking about deeply. Why does it look the way it does? Is this a good thing or a bad thing? For whom, exactly, and over what time horizon?
  7. “So, for any USD-INR forecast, higher inflation rates in India over the US that have been the default factor for the past few decades cannot form the basis. The Fund may have to revisit its implicit forecasts for USD-INR in April 2022.”

    Do you agree with the author’s assessment that inflation in India may not necessarily be higher than in the United States? Why or why not? With what implications beyond GDP calculations?

I’d recommend that you try and figure out the answers to these questions yourself, or even better, with a group of like-minded people. Run them past your prof(s), and see what they have to say. Wwrite up/record your answers and put ’em up for public consumption.

And best of all, try to come up with more such questions yourselves!

Samanth Subramanian on Out of Print Cricket Books

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…and much more besides (including a lovely excerpt on Sachin’s batting)