Trade Matters

If there’s one thing you should know about me, it is this: I love food.

Most of us do, I suppose, although I know people who are very much in – and very happy to be in – Team Eat to Live. But based entirely on a magnificently unscientific sampling exercise carried out by yours truly, I feel reasonably safe in saying that more than half of the people I’ve met love food.

But ah, not as much as I do. Me, I dream about food. I plan my day around food. I look up recipes on YouTube, read books about cooking food, read books about the history of food, watch food shows, and some of my best friends in Pune happen to be chefs at restaurants. Food is what makes life wonderful. Fact.

This is an obvious corollary, but I also like to cook. I should be honest and tell you that I am nowhere near as good a cook as I would like to be, but I get a little better every year. Some recipes are now definitely a part of my repertoire, and through a series of hits and misses (of which the latter are far superior in number to the former), I keep adding to to it every year.

But even so, we have a cook who comes home to cook our meals for us. Sure, sometimes my wife or I will take over the kitchen, but on a daily basis it is the cook who bakes for us our daily bread.

Which begs an obvious question.

Why?

Why, that is, do we have a cook coming at home to make our food for us when I like cooking and eating so much?

And my answer to this question is what toda’y blogpost is about.

The reason we have a cook at home is because paying the cook her salary is what makes us rich.

What allows me to type out this post instead of chopping up vegetables for dinner tonight? What allows me to read abstruse papers in economics to prepare for a class that I will teach today, instead of parboiling some rice? What allows me to curl up with a book on public policy, instead of kneading the dough to roll out some chapatis?

Time, of course. I earn time by paying the cook her wages. Because it is the cook who is doing all of these things, I have time on my hands.

What do I do with my time? Well, I write blog posts, I read abstruse papers, and I curl up with books. This allows me to get a little bit better at economics every passing year. Getting a little better at economics every passing year opens up new avenues to teach with every passing year. This teaching earns me enough money to live a comfortable life – and this comfortable life includes paying the cook her wages.

That is what I mean when I say that paying the cook her salary is what makes me rich.

Who loses out in the little “game” that our family plays with the cook? The game, in this context, is simply a way to refer to the fact that we pay the cook her monthly wages in return for the cook cooking our meals for us. Is my family worse off for having done so? I would argue no, for reasons I spoke about above.

Is the cook worse off for finding employment at our place (and at other homes in the neighborhood)? I have not asked her this question, but I feel reasonably safe in saying that she is not worse off. If anything, I would guess that she is better off because she has this job.

And so money exchanges hands for services rendered, but neither party walks away thinking that they got the short end of the metaphorical straw. We say thank you to the cook when we pay her her wages. And the cook says thank you to us when we pay her her wages.

Steven Horwitz speaks about going into a store to buy a turkey:

That turkey is not a gift, as the grocer gets my $9 per pound in return. It is instead a mutually beneficial exchange. We are genuinely thanking each other for having made us each better off. I am happier with the turkey than the $9 and the grocery store prefers the $9 to the pound of turkey. When we thank each other, we genuinely mean it. We are both grateful for the exchange.

https://fee.org/articles/the-double-thank-you-of-the-market/

Substitute the $9 per pound with the monthly wages of our cook, and substitute the turkey for the services rendered to us by the cook, and you will see that we’re both telling you the same story. Both sides of the transaction – in both cases – are benefitting from having been a part of the transaction, and therefore both are saying “thank you”.

(Fun question for you to think about: if you think Amazon is evil, does that make you evil too? This is assuming that you have transacted at least once on the Amazon platform, but then again, you almost certainly have, in one way or the other)

This is what economists mean when they say that trade is a non-zero sum game. Trade leaves both parties better off. Both parties in this “game” win. No one loses.

And this is a surprisingly counter-intuitive idea. Sports teaches us that for one side to win, the other has to lose. Sure, draws are possible in sports, but read the sentence again. For one side to win, the other has to lose. In trade, that is not necessarily the case. Both parties can (and often do) win.

Trade is a non-zero sum game, and the more you play this game, the richer you get.

And as I’ve said often enough on this blog, it is my deely held conviction that life is also a non-zero sum game – but that’s a story for another day.

For the moment, this lesson is more than enough for this blogpost:

Trade is a non-zero sum game

How Might You Use Incentives in Your Own Life?

It’s all very well to dispense gyaan about incentives, but what is the TMKK?

For those of you new in these parts, TMKK stands for To Main Kya Karoon? Learning about economics for its own sake only make sense in terms of scoring marks in an examination. But a subject truly comes alive when you are able to understand its relevance and importance to your own life – preferably directly, but at the very least tangentially. Don’t get me wrong, I am not at all suggesting that intellectual pursuits for their own sake are not worth it. But I am very much suggesting that the ability to answer a TMKK for oneself makes it much more interesting.

So how should once use incentives in one’s own life?

  1. You can make museum visits less boring.
  2. You can lose weight. I cannot find the reference I’m looking for right now, but Tim Ferriss once spoke about how you can send a truly embarassing pic of yourself to a friend, with instructions to post it on social media by the end of the month – unless a certain amount of weight loss has been achieved. If pics on social media is not your thing, give an amount of money that will truly pinch you to your friend, with instructions to donate it to a cause/political outfit that you truly loathe – again, unless a certain amount of weight loss has been achieved.
  3. What is the Pomodoro technique if not an incentive mechanism? There is more to it, sure, but incentives are certainly involved, no?
  4. If you have a gym buddy, yes, that too is an incentive mechanism. There is another phrase for it – peer pressure. That simply means that it’s not so much about you missing gym, but about the pressure you feel for letting your friend down. But the underlying mechanism? Incentives! In this case, it is a non-monetary, negative incentive.
  5. In my opinion, nobody does gamification using non-monetary incentives better than Duolingo.
  6. Ask ChatGPT3 for more examples! I could have done this myself, of course, but you really should get in the habit of using ChatGPT3 as a tool to do all kinds of research – it’s what you’re going to be doing in your careers in many different ways, so the correct time to get started is yesterday.
  7. Think about examples from your own life where you’ve tried to design incentives for yourself. Ask yourself which ones worked and which ones didn’t, and then ask yourself if we humans treat positive and negative incentives the same way.
  8. Best of all, try designing incentives for somebody in your family. See how they respond to your incentive mechanism, and see if you can iterate it (the mechanism) for the better. If you’re looking for an example – what if you promise to make breakfast in bed for a family member who promises not to look at their phone after dinner throughout the week. Will this work? Try it out! (Note: not a single “I just need to do this one little thing” allowed!). Try the same experiment the next week, but this time, use a “punishment” instead. Say, a fine of a thousand rupees, payable to you, if they break the rule.
  9. If you do “run” the experiment in pt. 8 above, ask yourself if Goodhart’s Law applied.
  10. Get better with every passing week at designing incentives, refining them and implementing them, both for yourself and for others. You’ll be surprised in two regards. First, you’ll be surprised at how easy it is to design better and better incentives. And second, you’ll be surprised to learn that GoodHart’s Law is always applicable. Tricky little beasts, incentives.

Incentives Matter

A little hobby of mine, that I have managed to get my daughter hooked on to as well, is etymology.

I’ve long held that concepts become more interesting, more relatable and therefore more memorable – in the literal sense of the term – once you’re able to tell yourself a story about the underlying concept. Look up the etymology of the word “average”, for example, and it is likely to be a story you won’t forget in a hurry. By the way, here’s a fun question the daughter asked some months ago, and I’ve been kicking myself for not having thought of it first.

So what is the etymology of the word incentive?

From Medieval Latin incentīvus (“that strikes up or sets the tune”), from incinō (“to strike up”), from in- (“in, on”) + canō (“to sing”).

https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+the+etymology+of+incentive

I like words. I like stories that can be fashioned out of, and about, words. If you click around on the search result that I have linked to, you realize that you can go down quite a rabbit hole about the history of the word incentive. Words such as kindle, singing, and incendiary crop up, and the associations these words can conjure up in one’s mind can result in a very pleasant couple of hours. But the phrase that resonated the most with me was “sets the tune”. It fits nicely with what incentives actually do in real life – they do set the tune on which we are tempted to dance.

Now who sets the tune, for whom, and with what consequences – that’s a whole other story, and practitioners of public policy can tell this tale much better than most other folks. But even outside the always-fascinating drama that is always being staged in the theater of public policy, this story is at the heart of what plays out in applied economics. Who is incentivizing whom, towards what end, and do the incentives end up producing intended or unintended consequences, and at what cost – these are fascinating questions to answer.

My favorite story about getting incentives right comes from Marginal Revolution University:

And my favorite story about getting incentives wrong comes from Calvin and Hobbes:

https://calvinandhobbes.fandom.com/wiki/Calvin%27s_Allowance

And that’s the tricky thing with incentives. Getting them right is a surprisingly difficult thing to do. The reason it is a surprisingly difficult thing to do is because of a variety of reasons, but it is possible to start to think about building a framework that one might use to design incentives.

Begin by asking yourself this question: Who is designing the incentive, and for whom?

Let’s begin with a simple example. Let’s say I am designing an incentive for myself. If, I say to myself, I can finish writing the blog post you’re reading right now without taking a break, I’ll reward myself by having a cup of coffee. In this case, I am designing an incentive for myself – I am setting a tune for myself to dance to.

Note two other things about this little incentive scheme:

  1. It is a positive incentive. I am not going to punish myself if I do not finish my designated task – that would be a negative incentive. I am, instead, going to reward myself if I finish my designated task. Think of the old English phrase “the carrot and the stick” to get a sense of what a positive and negative incentive mean.
  2. It is a non-monetary incentive. I am not going to reward (or punish) myself with money. There is no prize money, nor is there a fine. There is, instead, a non-monetary reward – a nice hot steaming cup of coffee. Incentives need not always be monetary!

So, a positive, non-monetary reward to finish a task. What could possibly go wrong? Consider the opening paragraph of Ch. 6 of a lovely little book called In The Service of the Republic:

In 1902 in Hanoi, under French rule, there was a rat problem. A bounty was set—one cent per rat—which could be claimed by submitting a rat’s tail to the municipal office. But for each individual who caught a rat, it was optimal to amputate the tail of a rat, and set the rat free, so as to bolster the rat population and make it easier to catch rats in the future. In addition, on the outskirts of Hanoi, farms came up, dedicated to breeding rats. In 1906, there was an outbreak of bubonic plague that killed over 250 people.

Kelkar, Vijay; Shah, Ajay. In Service of the Republic . Penguin Random House India Private Limited. Kindle Edition.

By the way, the footnote associated with this little tale contains the link to the fuller story, and is worth reading in its entirety. It would appear that the cobra story from India doesn’t have any corroborative evidence. For those who don’t know the background, there is a very similar story from India, only involving cobras isntead of rats. (If you will permit a slight digression: I was telling both of these stories to my daughter, and her only observation was to note that the cobra story was unlikely because “won’t cobras be an example of an apex predator? They can’t grow as quickly as rats, correct?”)

But what can go wrong is what the government in Hanoi discovered – that the person for whom the incentive has been designed may well end up hearing a completely different tune than the one that the designer of the incentive intended. That is, the designer would like you to do x, but you end up doing y instead.

Teachers may set up assignments to incentivize learning, but students are playing a different game. They are looking to minimize efforts in order to maximize marks. Ditto for managers and members on a team in the corporate world. Ditto, as I and my wife have been discovering to our chagrin, for parents and kids! That last bit has been a particularly aggravating discovery, since both my wife and I are economists.

But this phenomenon of incentives not working out as envisaged has an entire “law” of its own, called Goodhart’s Law. This is what it says:

“Any measure that becomes a target stops being a measure”

You’ll find different phrasings of the same idea online, but that’s the simplest way to express the idea. If the measure (to stop the culling of the rat population) is rat’s tails that have been cut off, and you make this the target – well, they stop being a measure of the culling of the rat population!

And that’s why designing incentives is so very tricky. The Indian government found this out to its cost in the aftermath of demonetisation, for example, but rather than look for examples elsewhere, I think you learn about incentives best when you try to think of examples from your own life.

But you cannot – simply cannot – be a student of economics without appreciating both what incentives are, and how difficult it is to design and implement them. The study of this facet of economics will last for your entire life, and you will always find something interesting to learn about it, every single time.

Incentives matter.

Now, if you will remember, I had promised myself a cup of coffee if I finished writing this blog post without taking a break. Goodhart’s law would imply that I would indeed finish writing this blog post without taking a break, but presumably at the cost of either its length, or its quality, or possibly both. I leave it to you to judge if that has been the case.

Me?

I’ll go brew that cuppa.

What is Cricket Optimizing For?

What if you asked an economist how to go about analyzing the answer to this question? I’m not so interested in the answers to this question in today’s post, but in trying to figure out how to go about thinking about how to set up this question for analysis. But I will conclude today’s post by trying to answer some of the questions/points I will have raised by then.

  1. What do we mean when we say “cricket”? Do we mean the players, the administrators, the viewers, the businesses interested in informing the viewers about the sport, or all of the above? If it is to be all of the above, are they all pulling in the same direction? If not, should we not be analyzing what each of them are optimizing for?
  2. What do we mean when we say “cricket”? Do we mean international cricket, or the leagues?
  3. What do we mean when we say “international” cricket? Do we mean Test match cricket, or One-Day Internationals os T20 internationals?
  4. What is cricket optimizing for, but also over what time horizon? What is best for cricket this year, in 2023? What is best for cricket in the medium run – say over the next five years? What is best for cricket over the next ten years? Do the answers change given the horizon, and do the answers change given the answers to the first three questions?
  5. If any one, or more, of the answers to these questions are such that they are in contradiciton to one another, how should we prioritize? On what basis?

The larger point behind today’s post is not to figure out how to figure out the answers to these questions. The larger point is to help all of you realize that analysis can only begin in earnest once the questions are clear in your own head. And while a throwaway question like “What is cricket optimizing for?” is fun to think about over a couple of beers, breaking it down into its constituents is always helpful. When you tackle any big picture question, spend some time in breaking it down into its constituent parts. Oh, and make good ue of the MECE principle while doing so.

For example: what is China optimizing for isn’t the correct question. Who within China are you talking about? Ditto for Russia. And for the USA.

“What are you optimizing for?” is a great question to ask, but only if you really and truly know who the “you” in the question is.

But having said all that, here are some (not all!) points from me for having considered these questions:

  1. What do we mean when we say cricket?
    • Players will want to maximize their incomes. This is not me being sarcastic, or saying that players are mercenaries. This is me saying that players are human beings. Had it been you or I in their place, we would also have wanted to maximize our incomes over the 15 years or so (at most) that we could have realistically played the game at a professional level. That is not a bad thing, it is a perfectly rational thing to do!
    • Administrators are optimizing for maximizing revenue streams. This is also a perfectly rational thing to do, but I do think that administrators are maximizing revenue streams over the short run, and are damaging the long-term health of the game while doing so.
    • The viewers (en masse) are optimizing for alleviating boredom. There will always be some eyeballs for a match, no matter where it is being played, and no matter between whom, and no matter how inconsequential. This results in the point above, and this is a great example of why thinking long term is A Very Good But Very Underrated Thing.
    • Businesses are optimizing for maximizing their long term returns, but across many diverse businesses. Amazon Prime doesn’t show you cricket matches from New Zealand because they are passionate about cricket, but because Amazon is passionate about getting you hooked on to Amazon Prime. Which, in turn, will get you hooked on to using Amazon. But that is just one example of a broadcaster (loosely defined) optimizing for its larger business interests (also loosely defined). ESPNCricinfo is also a business that is about informing you about cricket, but they have a much more direct interest in (and passion for) the sport. But obviously a very different business model, and this before we start to think about ESPN, and Disney. Note that this is a hugely complicated point, and difficult to speak about in a single blogpost, let alone a sub-point of a point in a blog post!
  2. In an ideal world, we would be optimizing for maximizing the long term health and popularity of the game. But we do not live in an ideal world. We therefore need to ask ourselves which of these groups mentioned above are likely to hold sway, and at what cost to the interest of all the other groups. That administrators and businesses are likely to take most decisions is a given. That they are likely to do so in favour of their own interests is obvious. Getting their interests to align with those of the viewers, and to have all interests be focussed on the long run would be a good way to get going towards living in that ideal world. Think long term, everybody!
  3. There is no escaping the fact that we really should be having a conversation about having the 2023 ODI World Cup being the swansong for the format at large. Scrap T20 Internationals, save for only a T20 World Cup, held once every two years.
  4. These apart, T20 leagues in all major cricket playing nations.
  5. Cross-subsidization of Test matches for as long as possible, and the eventual demise of this version of the sport too. I hope this is delayed for as long as possible, but it is an eventual inevitability.

Pts. 3, 4 and 5 are assertions/predictions on my part, but I see no way out of these conclusions. Cricket, if it really is going to optimize for maximizing the long term health and popularity of the game, needs to shed an entire format and cross-subsidize another one for the foreseeable future. And bilateral cricket should die a natural death with Test cricket, whenever it happens. To be clear, my personal hope is that it never does. But I am betting, alas, that it will.

I would love to be wrong, but I fail to see how.

What Am I Optimizing For on EFE in 2023?

Six principles, three big picture questions, and three bonus questions.

Anybody who’s attended a principles class taught by me knows what is coming next. It is my deeply rooted conviction that almost every single problem/concept/idea in economics can become more relatable by simplifying it down to one out of these twelve things: six principles, three big picture questions and three bonus questions. If you get the hang of these twelve things, you can go a very long way in terms of both understanding what economics is about, and how economics can be used to make the world around you a slightly better place.

And while mastery over these twelve things will likely take a lifetime – and almost definitely more than that – familiarity with them isn’t so difficult. And my aim is to write blogposts – in one way or another, and as much as possible – centered around one of these twelve things.

Not just blogposts, but we’ll leave that for aother day. For today’s blogpost, a simple list of what these twelve things are.

First, the six principles:

  1. Incentives matter
  2. TINSTAAFL – There is no such thing as a free lunch
  3. Costs matter
  4. Trade matters
  5. Prices matter
  6. Externalities matter

If I’m teaching a class in a semester at a college, I would dearly like to spend as much time as possible in speaking about just these six principles. Different teachers the world over may have a slightly different list, but I would be surprised if there were to be no overlap at all between two different lists. We may define concepts within these principles slightly differently, we may disagree on some of the underlying mechanisms, but here’s a nice way to think about my list. I am more than willing to listen to arguments about what I really should be adding to my list, but you’ll have to do a lot of convincing to make me remove an item from this list.

These six principles really do define economics for me. They can be expanded upon in multiple ways, a million derivatives can be constructed, there are endless tangents that can be drawn, and the nuances for each can be separate books in their own right. But at it’s heart, these six principles do most of the weight-lifting when it comes to economics.

Next, the three big picture questions:

  1. What does the world look like?
  2. Why does it look the way it does?
  3. What can we do to make the world a better place?

I don’t much like the artificial divide of the subject into “micro” and “macro” economics, but if you like, you can think of the six principles as a way to think about an introduction to microeconomics, while these three questions are a way to get started on thinking about macroeconomics. Depending upon how you want to go about answering the third question, there is yet a further division that is possible, between short term macroeconomic fluctuations and long term growth theory. But we’ll get to that in a bit.

But you can’t really begin analyzing macroeconomics without having a sense of what the world looks like today. Which countries in the world are doing well today, and how do you define “doing well”? Which countries in the world are not developing as rapidy as one would have hoped for? A comparative analysis of what the world looks like is where the study of macroeconomics should start.

At which point, the second question comes into its own. Why is Afghanistan doing so poorly when compared to its peers (howsoever defined), or when compared to its neighbours? Is it because Afghanistan is a landlocked country? Are all landlocked countries poor? If not, why not? Is it because of natural resources in Afghanistan? Is it because of geo-politics? Is it because of colonization? Does religion have a role to play? The list of questions is nowhere near complete, and this is just one nation. We can go on and on like this for all nations – and multiple careers have been spent on answering only parts of one question for just one nation.

And then we come to question number three, the most vexatious question of them all. Just two little words in that sentence, but what a world of (intellectual) pain they bring forth into the world.

“What can we do to make the world a better place?”

Who is we? What form of government works best to make one’s own country a better place? Is the answer to this question always the same regardless of the stage of development? Is your answer based on ideals and hope, or on empiricism? For which part(s) of the world and in which time period?

Does the word better mean the same thing to all people? Are we in a better world when everybody has access to a washing machine? Or are we in a better world when we don’t generate more carbon emissions? Can we have both? If yes, how?

These three questions define macroeconomics for me. Most of what we do in big picture economics (a term that I prefer to macroeconomics, for reasons I’ll get into in a later blogpost) can be thought of using this framework.

There are many good things that have happened as a consequence of blogging regularly here on EFE. But one of the best things to have happened is that I’ve been able to come up with three additional questions – questions that I find myself asking ad nauseam, both to myself and of other people:

  1. What are you optimizing for?
  2. Relative to what?
  3. Over what horizon?

That first question, strictly speaking, isn’t really a question economics can answer. What you are optimizing for is a question that requires deep introspection, and the answer likely comes from either other domains, or from a place that will perhaps forever lie beyond the fartherest probes of academia. But I will say this much – it is impossible to proceed further in economic analysis of any kind, without clarity about the answer to this question.

The second question here really is just another way of saying opportunity costs. But it is surprising to see how easy it is to forget that opportunity costs are real. This is particularly true in the case of public policy, but “relative to what” is a question that more people need to ask of themselves (myself included).

And finally, that most problematic of all questions: time. Just when you think you’re done with intellectual wrestling, trying to answer that third question can often bring you all the way back to square one. Is your answer to the first two questions the same over all time horizons?

I could have optimized for playing (judge me all you like) Subway Surfers instead of writing this post, because I was optimizing for relaxing myself. Or that, at any rate, is the story I tell myself when I give in to temptation. That choice is the best for me (if at all) only in the very short run. That is, over a very short horizon. So is playing yet another round of Subway Surfers really the best thing that I can do? Back, as I said, to square one.

India can optimize for (extending PMGKAY/ reviving the old pension scheme / pick whichever topic makes you the most uncomfortable), and ask yourself why what India is optimizing for. Ask what the opportunity costs of doing so will be. And finally ask if your answer (whatever it may be) remains the same if you ask what is best for India over the course of the next two years. What about two decades? What about two centuries? Which is the best timeframe to use to answer this question, and whatever your answer, what are you optimizing for? Back, as I said, to square one!

In one way, this is exactly what I have been doing in any case these past six years – writing blogs about these topics. A little bit of circular logic is involved here, of course. If I say that this framework:

six principles | three big picture questions | three bonus questions

can be used to think about any topic in economics, maybe I say I’ve been writing about this because I now think about those blogposts that I have written using this framework.

Be that as it may, writing here on EFE has convinced me that this framework can be used to think about all questions in economics, regardless of whether you have been formally trained in the subject or otherwise. And my attempt, this year, is going to be to think about as many questions as I can, explicitly using this framework. Of course I’ll benefit, but hey, as the sixth principle reminds us, externalities matter. You’ll benefit too!

Or is it the other way round?

But Why 68?

Doing mental math has been a way to avoid boredom for years, in my case. I would dream up mental math games to stay awake in classes in school and college, and often play around with number pattterns in my head when I’m out driving or riding. It doesn’t make me the world’s best travel companion, I suppose, but on the flipside, I never get bored on long solo trips.

But even in extremely short trips, such as those between different floors of the same building, I can’t help but think about math. And I’ve always wondered why lifts (elevators, if you want to be all fancy) assume that the average body weight is 68 kilograms.

Try it, the next time you get into a lift anywhere in India. Take a look at the number of people the lift will mention as the upper limit in terms of capacity, and take a look at the maximum permissible weight. The second number divided by the first will always be 68.

Why?

This question has been asked (and answered) on Quora, but the answer isn’t very satisfactory. Nor is the link used within that answer very informative. It simply states, in the case of a tragic accident involving elevators that one should assume an average weight of 68 kg, and given this assumption, it goes on to state that the accident was because of excess weight.

But that, of course, still leaves our question unanswered – why should one assume that the average weight of a human being is 68 kg?

The internet is a wonderful thing, and its long tail is a sight to behold. A Google search took me to a website that seems to be – best as I can tell – for fans of elevators. Yes, really – and they had this interesting factoid:

In Europe Standard, every passengers are assigned to at least 75 kg by default[1]. However, the suggested people can carry by the elevators are related how many spaces can the elevator allocated. Which is the Available Car Area[2]. (sic)

https://elevation.fandom.com/wiki/Capacity

That first footnote takes you to a Facebook page (of all things), and even there you’ll need to use Google Translate to get at what the text (which is in Chinese) is saying. But that just turns out to be a Hong Kong manual of some sort that simply says the same thing again. And no matter whether it is 68 kgs or 75 kgs, there still seems to be no answer to the question: why?

Wikipedia has an entry on the issue, and here is a table from that entry:

RegionAdult population
(millions)		Average weightOverweight population /
total population		Source
Africa53560.7 kg (133.8 lb)28.9%[12]
Asia2,81557.7 kg (127.2 lb)24.2%[12]
Europe60670.8 kg (156.1 lb)55.6%[12]
Latin America and the Caribbean38667.9 kg (149.7 lb)57.9%[12]
North America26380.7 kg (177.9 lb)73.9%[12]
Oceania2474.1 kg (163.4 lb)63.3%[12]
World4,63062.0 kg (136.7 lb)34.7%[12]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_body_weight#Average_weight_around_the_world

Note that the data is from 2005. Lots of interesting data points to ponder over in that table, not the least of which is the ratio of the overweight population to total population column – North America is at an eye-popping 74%! But the average weight, for Asia, was only at 57.7 kgs. Does that mean that we can get more people in lifts in India? Let me perfectly clear: I am not for even a single second suggesting that we carry out crazy experiments like these ourselves. But as a statistician and an economist, I cannot help but ask if there is slack in the system.

Before we move on to the next table from Wikipedia, a slight digression based on [12] in the last column of that table. That footnote refers to a paper titled “The weight of nations: an estimation of adult human biomass“, and it is quite a read in its own right. This paragraph in particular caught my eye:

The average BMI in USA in 2005 was 28.7. If all countries had the same age-sex BMI distribution as the USA, total human biomass would increase by 58 million tonnes, a 20% increase in global biomass and the equivalent of 935 million people of world average body mass in 2005. This increase in biomass would increase energy requirements by 261 kcal/day/adult, which is equivalent to the energy requirement of 473 million adults. Biomass due to obesity would increase by 434%.

Walpole SC, Prieto-Merino D, Edwards P, Cleland J, Stevens G, Roberts I. The weight of nations: an estimation of adult human biomass. BMC Public Health. 2012 Jun 18;12:439. doi: 10.1186/1471-2458-12-439. PMID: 22709383; PMCID: PMC3408371.

Back to the next table in the Wikipedia entry, however. Here is where it gets even more fascinating. This table claims that the average weight of Indians is 65 kgs – but that’s for men. Women, on the other hand, are at 55 kgs. The table is too large to paste over here, but you can click here.

So where do they get that number from? The table links to an out-of-date webpage, but a little searching around on that page takes you here.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1j3umH5zcJAGNR_WUFwl3-0rBiemYw8DR/view

But does this mean that the average weight of Indian men is 65kgs, and that of women is 55 kgs? Or does this mean (which is what I think) that the reference Indian adult man and woman have a fixed body weight of 65 and 55 kgs respectively?

The NFHS factsheet simply tells us the percentage of people in India who are adult and overweight (30% in urban areas for both sexes, and about 20% in rural areas, in case you were wondering) – but we still dont know the average weight of Indians!

My best guess is that the number doesn’t come so much from the average weight of Indians, but rather from the nice round nature of the number itself. Now, you might not think 68 kilograms to be a round number, but try converting it into pounds, and see if my little theory makes any sense.

If anybody knows anything about this, and is willing to help, it would be much appreciated. But more importantly, to any student of statistics reading this, you can bring the subject magically alive by just looking around you, and by asking questions of a stubborn nature – such as the one that I just tried to answer here!

Happy New Year!

A very happy new year to all of you, and all the very best with all of your plans for what lies ahead!

A Call for Help Re: Substack

What are the pros and cons of moving this blog to Substack?

This blog will forever be free, so I’m not looking to shift in order to monetize anything. But for those of you who have used Substack (and especially for those of you who have used both WordPress and Substack), what can you tell me that the Internet cannot?

Specifically:

  1. In what ways is Substack better, and in what ways is it worse in your experience?
  2. What are the limitations of Substack?
  3. Particularly for those of you who did migrate over to Substack, how complicated was your experience?

Thank you very much in advance!

Do More Of

Five things I hope to do more of in 2023

  1. Walking. And on a related note, more listening to podcasts and audiobooks.
  2. Reading books.
  3. Watching movies.
  4. Cooking. Especially with my daughter.
  5. Longform writing

These things are easy to say, and hard to do. Fingers crossed.

Do Less Of

Here is a list of things I hope to do less of in 2023:

  1. Exams (setting papers, correcting papers). Exams, given the way they are conducted almost everywhere I teach in India, are stupid. They fill hours of my time, but neither I, nor the students, benefit from them in any way. I am more than willing to die on this hill. Exams are stupid.
  2. Eat lesser. But conversely and not at all paradoxiacally, make every meal count. If the option is between eating a badly made meal and not eating, I hope I have the wisdom to pick the latter every time. It will have at least two advantages – I get to fast more than I did this year, and when I do eat, it is likely to be a much more pleasant experience.
  3. Spend less time reading stuff on the phone. My attention span suffers for it, and I need to get better at not taking my phone out of my pocket every chance I get.
  4. Reading while I am eating. Related to the second point, of course – I aim to make every meal I eat a celebration of food – but this is also related to the third point. But in general, try to get out of the habit of using the phone as a way to escape the world around me.
  5. Mindless YouTubing. That’s not the same as spending less time on YouTube – I’m convinced that I need to spend more time on the platform. But YouTube Shorts is the enemy, and so is YouTube’s recommendation engine. It doesn’t optimize for what is best for me in the long run, and I think Odysseus may well have been on to something.