Sunday Posts

I stopped reading The Economist, and that makes my weekends somewhat free. For fifteen years, since the time I first left India and went on to live in Dhaka, fetching it from the shop and reading it from cover to cover was part of my Friday routine. There were early disappointments - such as its blood-curdling advocacy of the Iraq War, which clearly exposed its Western bias - but it was one essential viewpoint that I needed to understand the world.  However, I increasingly found it disagreeable for its fundamentalist approach towards Free Markets. This is not a political left / right thing. Though I am openly delighted by the election of Jeremy Corbyn as the Labour leader, who I consider to be a vast improvement over the careerist politicians we see all around (alas, one of my favourite writers, Tristram Hunt, turned out to be one of them), I would like to think that I support free markets if they are really free. These are indeed my points of agreement with The Economist - w...

Innovation is important as the world is not enough. We can feel happy and smug with what we have achieved, but then returns this sinking feeling almost inevitably that all's not well. And, it is not: There is too many anomalies in our idea of progress. With most of people on the planet too poor to eat and the resources fast depleting, our prosperity feels like stolen, not earned. The innovation talk helps us feel better: In a way, innovation is the basis of our morality. But it is still easier said than done. The enemy of innovation is not any hidden monster, but steady state, which we are so eager to achieve. The final frontier forever features in our thinking and drives us: We aspire to stop and stay, therefore we move. It is only fortunate that some of us aim so high that we never finally reach that steady state. It is that Utopian aspiration, rather than rational thinking, which drives innovation. However, while we were good at innovating physical contraptions to extend our phy...

It was Herbert Spencer's fault. He read Charles Darwin's On The Origins of Species [1864] and thought it endorsed his own economic theories. And, he coined the term 'Survival of The Fittest', which became permanently associated with Darwin's name after he accepted the term as synonymous to his own 'natural selection' and used it in the Fifth edition of the Origin . Thus, Darwin gifted the capitalist market economics its greatest gift - that it resembles the laws of nature - and paved the way for thinking which will later be labeled as 'Social Darwinism' or 'economic Darwinism'. It is worth reflecting back on this connection between how nature works and how modern economic thinking sees it working, because we are at an important inflection point in our history when we must question all the conventional wisdom thrown at us. Economic policy making has been dominated by Economic Darwinism, since the failure of Welfare State thinking in the 1970...

It is fashionable to be a socialist these days. Even in America, that is. In Europe, various socialist parties have always existed, though past their prime after 1970s, but in America, being called a Socialist was an abuse. That remains unchanged indeed - last week we have seen various schemes being labelled socialism - but there is a new openness to the new socialism. The family tree of new socialism, as presented by Kevin Kelly in WIRED , traces its roots to Utopia and the high point in Paris Commune, but connect up Linux, Twitter and Blogger in the same family. Indeed, the biographies and a new film about Che Guevara has made a comeback in Europe even when we thought we have seen the last of Fidel Castro. And, the universal acceptance of capitalist way of life is suddenly looking challenged in the face of a global recession brought about by the wisdom of the markets. But, then, what about socialism's blemishes? The state socialism is dying. Theocracy and autocracy has taken over...