I read somewhere that the US president does little bold work during his first term as his sole intention at that point of time is to get re-elected. In his second term, however, he tends to take more risks and make bold decisions, for he knows that he can never be re-elected.

I was wondering what would be the consequences if we limited the number ( Read more... )

I'm in the process of reading the Goldman Sachs report about what India should do to become a superpower by 2050. Have read some 4 pages of it so far.

The guys who have written the report seem to be the type that aced all their social science exams. They were told they need to come up with 10 points and (as Aadisht mentions) decided to forget the ( Read more... )

The concept of opportunity costs seems to be non-trivial, in the sense that most people don't seem to get it. When I first learnt it as part of my Economics course at IIT Madras, I thought it was fairly common sense. However, looking around at a variety of people, it doesn't seem to be that common.

A few Sundays back, I came home in the evening ( Read more... )

So petrol prices have gone up by a whopping 10%, and LPG by an even more whopping 16%. It's quite ironical that the government, which in the name of the aam aadmi had rolled back a number of reforms has had to do this in the final year of its reign. They say that the prices have been moved up by an amount more than necessary, so as to leave room ( Read more... )

Ravikiran Rao argues that the reasons most Indian parties are afraid to embrace inner party democracy is that the people who are in charge are afraid that if they introduce democracy and lose the first election, their opponent might destroy the democracy and just keep the power with himself.

Isn't this the case everywhere? Be it Indian political ( Read more... )

Earlier today, I wrote about some theoretical aspects regarding ministry formation - talking about incentivising, regional/community balance, etc. Here are some pertinent observations about the ministry itself.

• There have been some rumblings about three leaders from Bellary (two Reddy brothers and Sriramulu) who have less than ten years in the ( Read more... )

So Yeddyurappa has been finally sworn in as the CM of Karnataka, this time hopefully for a longer period. Some 29 people have already been sworn in with him, leaving just four more slots (there is a limit of 34 on the size of the ministry). Trouble has already started brewing as some senior leaders and long-term MLAs (such as Jagadish Shetter, ( Read more... )

I think the last thirty years of Indian politics and policy can be explained using the "public enemy number one" theory. It all started off with emergency, when the Congress easily became the enemy. For the elections in 1977, an alliance of non-congress parties was quickly cobbled up with the sole intention of keeping the congress out. As expected ( Read more... )

The government's latest gimmick to keep petrol prices unrealistically low is to impose a special additional levy on income tax and corporate tax in order to finance the deficit. Basically a scheme to rob peter and pay paul. Make the higher-income guys pay for the excess oil consumption by the lower income guys.

It might sound robin hood-esque and ( Read more... )

It seems like.

They decided to extrapolate based on one data point - Tejaswini Sriramesh beating Deve Gowda - or there might be another which I can't recall right now and they came to the wonderful conclusion that the Deve Gowda family will get defeated when faced with women candidates. They even got an astrologer to endorse it. And put up two ( Read more... )