Tag: vivek dehejia

The Return of Protectionism, Writing Better Papers, 100 True Fans, Corona Virus and Classics on the Kindle

Five articles that I enjoyed reading this week, and figure you might as well.

 

Vivek Dehejia raises an uncomfortable question: are we more protectionist now than at any point of time since 1991, and examines some of the possible impacts.

Even the most well-inclined observers can no longer palm-off previous tariff increases by the current government as mere one-offs or aberrations. It is abundantly clear now, unfortunately, that the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in its second innings even more than the first, has abandoned an almost three-decade commitment to trade liberalization, going back to the initial liberalization impetus of 1991. Notably, even governments that did not further liberalize, at the very least refrained from sliding back into protectionism. No more, though—we are now witnessing a more or less explicit embrace of import substitution, which had been thought abandoned in 1991 and beyond.

Useful advice for writing academic papers on development better. Even if you don’t write these yourself, this article might have useful advice about selecting which ones to read.

You win or lose your readers with the introduction of your economics paper. Your title and your abstract should convince people to read your introduction. Research shows that economics papers with more readable introductions get cited more. The introduction is your opportunity to lay out your research question, your empirical strategy, your findings, and why it matters. Succinctly.

Some years ago, Kevin Kelly wrote an article called 1,000 true fans (he does a lot else besides, by the way, and learning more about him is worth your time). Li Jin has written a follow-up piece that I hope rings true in the years to come.

Today, that idea is as salient as ever—but I propose taking it a step further. As the Passion Economy grows, more people are monetizing what they love. The global adoption of social platforms like Facebook and YouTube, the mainstreaming of the influencer model, and the rise of new creator tools has shifted the threshold for success. I believe that creators need to amass only 100 True Fans—not 1,000—paying them $1,000 a year, not $100. Today, creators can effectively make more money off fewer fans.

I have so far resisted linking to or speaking about the Corona virus, primarily because I don’t know enough about the topic to speak responsibly about it. That, I’m sorry to say, hasn’t changed, but reading this article was helpful for me, and hopefully is for you as well!

The next two months will be critical, and it is important for all of us to do everything in our power to minimize viral spread. The simple stuff includes washing hands more frequently, greeting others without handshakes, getting a flu shot (if you haven’t already), and cleaning and disinfecting frequently touched objects. All of these actions are recommended by the CDC. Hopefully, through behavioral changes such as these, we will be able to keep R0 below 1 and prevent this virus from becoming a pandemic.

A random question asked in class this week spurred this search, and maybe you find this list useful yourself? I certainly did! Free classic literature on Kindle.

India: Links for 7th October, 2019

  1. This was a fascinating read. I was aware of the flu and its impact on India, but had no clue about the extent, the severity and the multiple what-might-have-beens. For example:
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    “y 1918, Gandhi was being seen in intellectual circles as a future leader of the nation, but he lacked grass-roots support. That spring, in his native state of Gujarat, he had organised two of his first satyagrahas, but these were followed by thousands of people, not hundreds of thousands. When the flu returned that autumn, he was struck down, as were other leading members of the independence movement who shared his ashram, notably Gangabehn Majmundar, the formidable spinning teacher, and Shankarlal Parikh, who had helped organise one of those early satyagrahas. Gandhi was too feverish to speak or read. He could not shake a sense of doom. “All interest in living had ceased,” he wrote later, in his autobiography.”
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  2. Professor Jayanth Varma is less than impressed with benchmarking for loans, and the rules associated with them:
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    “In the next few years, India needs to work on creating both a better banking system and better financial markets. One of the pre-requisites for this is that regulators should step back from excessive micro-management. For example, the RBI Master Directions require the interest rate under external benchmark to be reset at least once in three months while elementary finance theory tells us that if the floating rate benchmark is a 6-Months Treasury Bill yield, it should reset only once in six months. Either banks will refrain from using the six month benchmark (eroding liquidity in that benchmark) or they will end up with a highly exotic and hard to value floating rate loan resetting every three months to a six month rate. Neither is a good outcome.”
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  3. “The Socioeconomic High-resolution Rural-Urban Geographic Platform for India (SHRUG) is a geographic platform that facilitates data sharing between researchers working on India. It is an open access repository currently comprising dozens of datasets covering India’s 500,000 villages and 8000 towns using a set of a common geographic identifiers that span 25 years.”
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  4. “Prime Minister Narendra Modi, through “Make in India”, has the right idea when he says he wants to make India a global or regional manufacturing hub. But this cannot be accomplished by keeping an inefficient domestic industry shielded behind import barriers forever. Until something is done to change that, the industry will continue to lurch from crisis to crisis, and no lessons will have been learned.”
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    Rupa Subramanya and Vivek Dehejia in Livemint on what ails the automobile industry, and how to correct it.
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  5. Speaking of which…
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    “For a car financed to the extent of Rs 6 lakhs and driven for 1500 km every month the effective cost of ownership/operations, with a driver is probably in the region of Rs 28 per kilometre. Shared mobility wins hands down against this arithmetic of ownership costs.”