Sunday Posts

Are we witnessing the end of an imperial era? Usually, these periods are fraught with violence and uncertainty. Empires are power structures, which crumbles from inside, and everything that stood on its edifice, values, ideas and systems, go down with them. Empires are stable - that's their raison d'etre! Even those who are disadvantaged by the empire support its existence because people would rather tolerate tyranny than anarchy. The end of any empire is therefore accompanied by instability. I know it is odd for me to think this is the end of an empire. The second Trump Presidency is as imperial as it gets. The United States, the world's overlord, is throwing its power around, threatening other countries with tariff and even invasion. It has approached major world issues unilaterally, pulling out of multilateral institutions or conventions, sitting down with Russia without other parties around and proposed to turn Gaza, in defiance of the all norms and wishes of everyone...

The pandemic made the universities scramble into online education. What happens next is the question. One line of thought is that this is just a temporary disruption. Life will return to normal, perhaps in 6 to 12 months time, and the classes will resume. Online will disappear to the margins, where it was. The other is that this is an irreversible loss of innocence. The rubicon has been crossed and a new normal has emerged. Even when this pandemic is behind us, we will never go back again to education-as-usual. Temporary disruption Indeed, it is perfectly logical to see the pandemic-induced online surge as temporary. As we live through imposed constraints, it's hard to imagine anything to be long term. The changes have happened overnight and we have had little time to adjust to it. We are hoping this will pass - soon - alongwith all its relics and practices. It is also true that online education has failed to live up to the hype. Universities and colleges went into poorly prepared,...

Whether being Global is desirable depends on which side of the fence you are at. But there could be a different approach. The word Global has specific meaning in its current usage. It is no longer the descriptive word that it was meant to be, with all the idealism of universal brotherhood. Since the 90s, when money became global, it has one very intrusive meaning for the recipients of globalization, those who turned their world upside down. Becoming Global, in that sense, means being an agent of this change, with a negative connotation for those from Global South. In this specific usage, the requirements are quite well defined. English is the language of this type of globalisation - indeed, more specifically, American English - and speaking the language of investment and prioritising on money-making is a must. Another rich country language is good - how about German - as is wide familiarity of power circles. The iconography of globalisation also includes a certain look, a cer...

Why does one care for new ideas? Because new ideas are central to economic growth. And, without growth, we will have no modern economy. Because one essential part of the modern economy is credit, which rests on the assumption that we will have more than we have today. If the economies stop growing indefinitely, credit will disappear and there will be no 'modern' economy. The mere hint of no-growth will be the economic equivalent of an armageddon. Ideas, in a way, are the protean agents that mine the future for the present. Think of ideas as a tool that is curving out bits of the future for the present day, doing in the real economy which the financial mechanics of credit creation is doing in the money economy. One can call them therefore the lifeblood of the economy, because without these new ideas, we won't have a view of the future, no optimism and therefore, no economy. And, yet, idea is a painful thing. To be really successful in what an idea does, one nee...

I haven't read Thomas Piketty's recent blockbuster, Capital in the Twentyfirst Century, because I am already so far behind on my reading intentions, but I intend to read it at some point of time. This 700 page economics tome has already sold 200,000 copies and caused quite a stir because of its popularity. One would hope that this will not become like its eponymous predecessor, Marx's Capital, a book popularly bought but seldom read. Like the latter, Piketty is trying to explore a great contemporary problem, inequality, and is doing so at the onset of another gilded age. The immediate trigger of this post is another post by Sudhakar Ram, whose writings on New Constructs I closely follow ( see here ). Sudhakar's response to the critique of Piketty's work - that it is no good talking about a problem if you can't solve it - is right on the money: Should I not tell you that you have cancer even if I don't know the cure for that? Besides, he also picks up o...

These days, most intelligent conversations tend to focus on two alternative possibilities. First, the more pessimistic ones, see the current recession going the same way as the Great Depression did, slowly altering political opinions and driving the world into protectionism and national chauvinism, finally leading to some kind of great war, which may lead to an end of civilisation. The proponents see a challenger power, like the 19th century Germany, in China, and the incumbent in the form of the massive global empire of the United States. Next, there is the optimistic view, which does not see a violent end of the civilisation but a re-balancing: This is more the doctrine of decline of the West and the rise of the rest. This view suggests a power-shift, to China and India, and possibly Brazil, and that they would emerge as the World's preeminent economic powers, in a replay of what happened during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth century Europe. To be clear, this is not the only vie...