we the people

We are educated

We are liberal

We are indians

We are hindus

We are muslims

We are christians

We are sikhs

We are jains

We are budhists

We are communists

We are marxists

We are trotskites

We are maoists

We are naxals

We are brahmins

We are tribals

We are the marginalized

We are the the scheduled castes

We are the other backward castes

We are the minority

We are the congress

We are the bjp

We are the janta d or u

We are poor

We are rich

We have a heart

We do charity

We speak no lies

We hurt no flies

We pray

We bow before gods

We chant

We don’t believe in gods

We are atheists

We are pantheists

We love animals

We don’t spit on the road

We don’t litter

We are not class-conscious

We resprect all faiths

We respect women

We protect our children


We are incorruptible

We do no wrong


We are all liars


We are racists

We are exploiters

We hate the less-fortunate

We use god as an excuse

We can kill if we want to

We will kill

We can bomb each other to rubble

We will bomb

We beat our husbands, wives, kids, fathers and mothers

We are selfish


We deserve our misery


Because


We know not love.....

times are spinning

Mr. Ponting is an honest man. He is being uneccesarily targeted by the Indian team. What are a couple of bad umpiring decisions and few lies by the Australian cricketers. Come on, grow up to the real world.

As for Mr. Ponting, he is the perfect role model for all kids, Australians or otherwise. Parents across continents should buy posters of Mr. Ponting and hang them on their walls. Pray to the lord of success to bless them…how to play hard and win at all costs. All this is not sarcasm.

Mr. Ponting after all is an honest man. He is after all a the national asset of Australia and of all ambitious people across the world. What is a little bit of abuse?

A little bit of abuse should be part of school curriculum in fact. Will toughen up kids who want to make a mark. A bit of verbal and in the coming days, physical also, is good. Makes you win. And that’s all that matters.

You have no option but to win.

So you think you can play?

Play like us, that is.

Can you abuse? Can you taunt? Can you ridicule? Can you rile? Can you irritate? Can you make me lose my focus? Can you make me lose concentration?

This is the way we play. Can you play like us? You can’t? No matter, we will still play the way we do. We are what we are. We will abuse your mother, father, your kids, your wife, your country, your honesty and integrity.

We will not stop at anything. We have to win because that’s all that matters. Who cares for the way you play. I don’t. I hae to defeat you. I have to rub your nose in the ground. I have to prove that I am superior to you. You are nobody. Your talent is irrelevant. Your skill is of no importance. I don’t clap when I see you doing good. I am not awe-struck when I see perfection at what you do.

I cringe. I hate myself when I see you succees. I loath the ground you walk on. How can you be better than me? How can I let you defeat me? Because my country will hate me. My fans will hate me. The Board will throw me out of the team. The advertising agencies will disappear. How can I not win everything I participate in?

My wife too will shoos me away when I lose. She fails to understand that it’s just a game. My kids will,in future, shoot me down with their toy guns when I don’t emerge victorious. Chants of sissy engulf me in the locker room if I am not like the others, shouting, cheering, inciting, cheating, lying. They will throw me out if I don’t become like them.

Success at all costs. The Australians are good at it. Do they have a nuclear arsenal also? They might just get riled and decide to bomb it because like Hemingway said ‘ the world is a fine place and worth fighting for’. The Australians too, like Morgan Freeman in 7, will most likely agree with the 2nd part, and kill everything in its wake.

That’s the sign of the times. It’s time Indians stop complaining and just play. Cheats will be seen as cheats, even by fans. And there will be a time for everything… a time for war and a time for peace, a time to win and a time to lose.

ASHES OF GANDHI

Does it matter, thought the ashes? I have been dead for so long. 60 years isn’t it? The million specks asked themselves and didn’t even bother to answer. Long, in fact, all of them agreed.

I have been here, in darkness. Why was I kept and why am I being set free? Am I being set free? Well, I can’t do much, can I? I shall stay where they put me and go where they send me. Air, water, muck everything’s the same for me.

But inspite of these and many more suspicions and apprehensions, the ashes woke up; ready for the final journey. No bath or towel, just stay put, it advised itself. As the morning gave birth, birds could be heard. Some unfamiliar sounds and some completely new. But I remember all of them. From tomorrow I will not be able to hear any of them. So long, my friends, the ashes said, silently and wondered if anybody hears anything silent? A little while later, footsteps could be heard. The light was switched on in the room and more than usual activity could be thinly guessed. What is going to happen?

Incense. Can’t they stick to the old ones? These smell synthetic; are they? Too many questions, old man, came the internal rebuke. O.K let me sail through today and then…

These footsteps are different, small…ah some kids have been marshaled. Will they sing songs?

Noises, more noises, who are these people? Some noises I know. Do they still love me or is it all? Why are you so suspicious, Gandhi’s ashes asked Gandhi? Just relax. You are dead, gone and they are laying to rest your last remnants. Be happy, you can sleep peacefully from today. You will take less space on earth. Lesser people will remember you, exploit you and your belongings and life…well, it will move on.

O.k from now on silence, vowed Gandhi.

Garlands…their smell mixing with the incense. Feet. Phones, so many ring tones. Murmurs. Bhajans. That little girl has a good voice. Dignitaries I think by the tone. Now what? I am being lifted. Is this my last day here? These walls, curtains, Mani Bhavan, my friends, I will miss you all, always.

Ah, the sun. So the journey begins again. Are there many people? Traffic and horns, too many horns. Am I on a hearse, again? Am I blocking traffic? the horns must be for a reason. Do they know that I am going forever today? Move on old man.

I hear the waves. Is it Girgaum? Must have changed in these years. I am enjoying this in fact. Why this silence?

Oh the sun stings. Haven’t seen rays in 60 years. Thanks for opening me up to the radiance. I love it. I thank you all.

The water looks dirty. Those days…they are gone, it’s o.k.

Water is cold. I am traveling. Where will this lead me? Ah, it’s the deep end of the ocean. Fishes. Beautiful.

pics of my microcontroller bot-prarabhm

 

 

 

 

DOLLAR A DAY

Guntur, southern India, is a city short of money but not of entrepreneurs. Stroll through the main thoroughfare of the largest slum at 9 in the morning, and outside every sixth house you will pass a woman sitting behind a kerosene stove, ready to prepare dosa—rice-and-bean pancakes—for passersby with a rupee to spare. An hour later, each woman will be onto her next job. One woman earns cash by sewing fancy beads onto cheap, plain saris. Others are laborers, rubbish collectors, or pickle-makers.

The scene is described by two MIT economics professors, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, in their recent article, "The Economic Lives of the Poor." They set themselves the task of explaining how very poor people make money and how they spend it.

The "very poor" are those who live on less than $1 a day. That benchmark—a rare piece of brilliant marketing from the World Bank—is both more generous and more frugal than it seems. Generous, because the benchmark dates from 1985 and has since been adjusted to take account of inflation. But frugal because the dollar is adjusted for purchasing power. In other words, a Kenyan farmer might have 50 cents a day to spend but still not count as "very poor" because 50 cents in Kenya buys more than $1 would in the United States. However you look at it, a dollar a day is a tiny income.


Perhaps surprisingly, then, even the poorest find the resources to let their hair down. Duflo and Banerjee, looking at economic surveys of the very poor from 13 different countries, conclude that about one-third of household income is spent on stuff other than food. The alternatives to simply trying to consume more calories include shelter, of course, but even the poorest find some money to spend on things such as tobacco, alcohol, weddings, funerals, or religious festivals. Radios and televisions are also popular. Looking at food spending itself, although the very poor do focus on the cheapest grain—millet—they also spend on wheat, rice, and even sugar. This is expensive and offers little nutritional benefit, but it certainly makes lunch taste better.

The very poor even seem to have some consumer power. For example, in the countries where free public schools are especially bad, some parents scrape together the resources to send the children to private schools. The teachers may be largely unskilled themselves, but at least they show up.

The same is true for health care. A pair of World Bank economists, Jishnu Das and Jeffrey Hammer, examined the quality of public and private health care in Delhi, India. They found that while publicly employed doctors tended to be far better qualified than the private doctors, the private doctors tried much harder, spending more time, asking more questions, and examining patients more carefully. Competition works even for the poor.

It would work better yet if the poor were less destitute. One of the problems is that so much of this entrepreneurial activity is carried out on too tiny a scale to make much cash. Scaling up would be more efficient but requires capital equipment. That's hard to come by in a world where bank loans are scarce (this is why people, including the Norwegian Nobel committee, get so excited about microcredit), and cash savings are at risk from inflation and theft. It would be better, too, if it were easy to set up a legal business. According to the World Bank's "Doing Business" reports, the poorest countries often boast red tape that means it takes months and costs a small fortune to set up in business.

But do not despair entirely. In 1981, 40 percent of the world's people lived on less than $1 a day, according to Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion of the World Bank. The figure plummeted to 21 percent by 2001 and may be as low 15 percent by 2015. We can hope.

the distance paradox

It stands to reason that distance is dead. Electronic communication is better and cheaper than it's ever been. Sitting on the sofa just now, I used a cheap laptop computer and my neighbor's wireless network and ordered a free quad-band mobile phone that—I am told—will let me make calls and send e-mails from almost anywhere in the world.

More to the point, nobody would be remotely impressed with my phone's features. Virtual worlds, BlackBerrys, video-conferencing from the local ccd—it has all become so easy—and so commonplace—so quickly.

Intuitively, that should mean that geography has become less important. E-mail and video-conferencing mean fewer flights. No more business conferences or meetings at delhi. Telecommuters don't need to clog up the roads, and property prices in London and mumbai should slide as people carry out their investment-banking responsibilities from nashik or udaipur.
Click Here!

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that there's something wrong with this argument. Despite the ease of communication and the drop in the cost of transporting goods, geography seems to be as important as ever for most of us. People haven't stopped flying to meetings and conferences. The World Economic Forum meetings are now a round-the-calendar circus in more than 10 countries. New York is one of the few places in the United States where the real-estate market isn't stuttering.

So, what is happening? To some extent, the same thing that happened to the paperless office. It turned out that all these computers made it easy and cheap to produce a lot more documents. Yes, the documents could in principle have been viewed on-screen, but why not print them out?

Similarly, e-mail, Internet networking, and cheap phone calls have made it easy to maintain a lot of relationships. In principle, some of the relationships could be restricted to cyberspace, but how much fun is that? The same e-mail that allows you to maintain long-distance business relationships also creates demand for more travel and more conferences as people try to establish those relationships in the first place. Mobile phones, Web mail, and BlackBerrys also make travel less costly because it is easier to keep working on the move.

Closer to home, communication technology makes it easier than ever to arrange a drink with friends. Just send a quick e-mail to a distribution list or post the invitation on your online journal. This sudden spontaneity isn't much use if your friends are hundreds of miles away. Mobile phones, far from fueling a flight to the countryside, make big cities more attractive and more manageable. E-mail and mobile phones aren't substitutes for face-to-face contact at all. As economists Jess Gaspar and Ed Glaeser have pointed out, they are complements to it.

Other technological changes have also strengthened the importance of place. If you can buy cars or films or insurance from anywhere in the world, why not buy from the place that is host to the best or cheapest producer? Cities that were once nationally dominant can now become international champions. It suddenly becomes more valuable, not less valuable, to locate in New York or London.

The modern economy demands ever more complicated, fast-moving, innovative, and creative projects. Formal contracts just aren't up to the task of keeping us honest in these circumstances, which means you need to be able to trust your colleagues—something that still requires you to look them in the eyes. Face-to-face meetings have always fostered trust and clearer communication, and they still do. So, the conference circuit is likely to be with us for a while.

its a goal!!!

Soccer being a famously low-scoring game,matches often finish in a draw and must be decided by penalty shootouts—a competitive form at which England has a particularly harrowing record. Perhaps England's players should study a little more economics.

In soccer, penalty kicks pit the goalkeeper against a lone striker in a mentally demanding contest. Once the penalty-taker strikes the ball, it takes 0.3 seconds to hit the back of the net—unless the goalkeeper can somehow get his body in the way. That is simply not enough time for the keeper to pick out the trajectory of the ball and intercept it. He must guess where the striker will shoot and move just as the ball is being struck. A keeper who does not guess correctly has no chance.

Both striker and keeper must make subtle decisions. Let's say a right-footed striker always shoots to the right. The keeper will always anticipate the shot and the striker would be better off occasionally shooting to the left—because even with a weaker shot it is best to shoot where the goalie isn't. In contrast, if the striker chooses a side by tossing a coin, the keeper will always dive to the striker's left: Since he can't guess where the ball will go, best to go where the shot will be weak if it does come. But then the striker should start favoring his stronger side again.

So, what to do? The answer comes from a wartime collaboration between economist Oskar Morgenstern and mathematician John von Neumann. They produced a "theory of games," which mathematically analyzed situations of strategic interaction—that is, any situation where participants have to take into account the other side's responses. A free throw in basketball is not a strategic interaction, but a soccer penalty is. A "game" is a mathematical description of how all the possible payoffs to the different players vary with their different strategies—so if the goalkeeper jumps to his left while the striker shoots to the keeper's right, the striker will get a high payoff and the goalkeeper will get a low one.

Von Neumann and Morgenstern did not, in fact, analyze penalties, although von Neumann did produce a simple analysis of poker that still influences that game today. But rather than aiming to help footballers or gamblers, von Neumann and Morgenstern believed that game theory could illuminate anything from pay negotiations to waging war. The strategic question could be translated into game theory's mathematical language, solved like any old mathematical problem, and then translated back into the real world to explain what to do.

The trouble is that for these real applications, the wrinkles of reality always obscure whether ordinary people actually follow the strategies that game theory predicts they should. Yet penalty taking is different. The objective is simple, the variables easy to observe, and the results immediate.

Game theory, applied to the problem of penalties, says that if the striker and the keeper are behaving optimally, neither will have a predictable strategy. The striker might favor his stronger side, of course, but that does not mean that there will be a pattern to the bias.

The striker might shoot to the right two times out of three, but we cannot then conclude that it will have to be to the left next time.

Game theory also says that each choice of shot should be equally likely to succeed, weighing up the advantage of shooting to the stronger side against the disadvantage of being too predictable. If shots to the right score three-quarters of the time and shots to the left score half the time, you should be shooting to the right more often. But as you do, the goalkeeper will respond: Shots to the right will become less successful and those to the left more successful. It might sound strange that at this point any choice will do, but it is analogous to saying that if you are at the summit of the mountain, no direction is up.

Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, an economist at Brown University, found that individual strikers and keepers were, in fact, master strategists. Out of 42 top players whom Palacios-Huerta studied, only three departed from game theory's recommendations—in retrospect, they succeeded more often on one side than the other and would have been better altering the balance between their strategies. Professionals such as the French superstar Zinédine Zidane and Italy's goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon are apparently superb economists: Their strategies are absolutely unpredictable, and, as the theory demands, they are equally successful no matter what they do, indicating that they have found the perfect balance among the different options. These geniuses do not just think with their feet.

darling,lets get divorced!

Yesterday we looked at the way competition for partners made men lazy and drove women to stay in school. Once you have found yourself a partner—or decided that you would rather stay single—how do you manage the household? What, to an economist, is a family? To answer that question we need to take a short detour to an 18th-century pin factory.

KIRKCALDY, Scotland, 1776

Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, traveled Europe as tutor to the Duke of Buccleugh. But despite his travels, Adam Smith never actually visited a pin factory. While sitting at home in Kirkcaldy and penning the most famous passage in economics, he was inspired by an entry in an encyclopedia. The passage is no less important for that.

Smith argued that a general handyman who turned his hand to the business of making pins,

… could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. But in the way in which this business is now carried on, not only the whole work is a peculiar trade, but it is divided into a number of branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head.

Smith reckoned that ten specialized pin-makers, using equipment designed and built by specialists, could produce 48,000 pins a day. Ten generalized handymen could produce perhaps one pin each. In the "trifling" business of making pins, quite rudimentary division of labor multiplied the output per person almost five thousand times. From a rational choice point of view, dividing labor is a no-brainer.

The division of labor is utterly fundamental to the wealth we enjoy in modern economies. Complicated products, such as the computer on which I am typing this paragraph, are unimaginable without the combined and cumulated efforts of the countless specialists who worked out how to manufacture integrated circuits or how to control a computer using a mouse and a pointer on the screen. Most of those specialists couldn't boil an egg, let alone survive alone on a desert island. They are dependent on other people's expertise, if only the expertise of the cooks at the local Chinese take-out, and computer users the world over are dependent on theirs.

Even simple products like the short cappuccino I have beside me would be impossible without the division of labor. Is there anyone in the world who has mastered ceramics, dairy farming and the art of the perfect espresso roast? I'd be bowled over by someone who had any two out of three.

That is all very well, but what does it have to do with marriage? There is not much reason to think that Adam Smith gave the matter much thought: a bachelor, he lived with his mother. Yet marriage used to be one of the fundamental ways to gain from division of labor. Before there were well-developed markets for anything much, and long before you could order a cappuccino, men and women were able to enjoy some of the gains from the division of labor by getting married, specializing, and sharing. Back on the Savannah, one might hunt and the other might gather. In the more recent past, one might be good at guiding a plough and sewing while another would specialize in cooking and household repairs. Nothing about Adam Smith's story suggests division of labor according to traditional sexual roles, but make no mistake: the family has rational roots. It is the oldest pin factory of all.

By the 1950s, those traditional sexual roles were fundamental in the division of labor within marriage. The ideal husband specialized in breadwinning, getting an education, a good job, working whatever hours were necessary to win promotion, and earning ever more to supply the family with a car, a fridge, a nice house in the suburbs and frequent holidays. His adoring wife specialized in homemaking, cooking, cleaning, entertaining, bringing up the children to be smart and wholesome and taking care of her husband's emotional and sexual needs.

That was the idea, at least, and in 1965, the average married woman worked fewer than 15 hours a week in paid employment. For the typical woman, a stay-at-home mom, that would be zero hours. The average was pulled up by empty-nesters and the very poor. Meanwhile, the average married man worked over 50 hours a week. The roles were neatly reversed for household work: married women did almost 40 hours a week of non-market work, men fewer than ten. This was division of labor all right, and it was division of labor along sexually lopsided lines.

It was economist Gary Becker who showed the implications of Adam Smith's pin factory for marriage in the modern age. How had the division of labor become so sexually lopsided? The answer was the interaction of three economic forces: the division of labor, economies of scale, and comparative advantage.

As Becker knew, division of labor works because it unleashes economies of scale. In plain English, one full-time worker earns more than two half-time workers. That is often true for the most basic jobs, but much more so for the most demanding positions. How many top lawyers do half a law degree and then work twenty-hour weeks? How many successful business executives work only Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesday mornings? And the top earners, at the peak of a long, full-time career, earn much, much more than those half-way through their careers. It is a harsh truth about the world of work that for many professionals, the more work you have done in the past, the more productive each additional working hour becomes: a perfect example of economies of scale.

This means that a household in which both parents work part-time on their careers and part-time looking after children and the home does not make rational economic sense. Two halves are much less than a whole. Economies of scale dictate that, logically, one partner should apply himself or herself full-time to paid work. The other should work at home-making, and only work for money if there is some spare time available after the household chores.

So far this is classic Adam Smith. Where did the traditional gender roles of the 1950s come from? Becker pointed out the implications of the third economic force, the principle of comparative advantage. Comparative advantage says that division of labor is governed not by who is most productive in some absolute sense, but in a relative sense. In Adam Smith's pin factory, if worker Elizabeth can sharpen two pins a minute and mount four pins a minute in paper, while worker James can sharpen one pin a minute and mount one pin a minute in paper, the logic of comparative advantage says that James should be sharpening pins, even though Elizabeth does the job faster. The relevant comparison is not whether Elizabeth sharpens pins faster than James but whether, relative to him, she sharpens pins faster than she mounts them in paper.

Imagine that James and Elizabeth are married; now, replace mounting pins in paper with looking after babies. Elizabeth is a more productive worker than James but also a more effective parent. James is a bad worker but a worse dad, and so Elizabeth takes the rational decision to stay home baking cookies and looking after the kids, while James tries to scrape together a living as a real estate agent. The logic of comparative advantage highlighted something that most men—except economists—have found it hard to get their heads around: there is no reason to believe that men were breadwinners because they were any good at it. They might simply have been breadwinners because getting them to help around the house would have been even worse.

Gary Becker's contribution was not to suggest that women make good parents, but to realize that because of economies of scale even a very small difference in innate capabilities could lead to titanic differences in how people actually spent their time. A small difference in relative expertise between men and women would be enough to cause a sharp division of labor across traditional sexual roles. That difference might be because of biological differences, because of socialization, or because of discrimination against women in the workplace, quite likely all three. Rather than arguing for any particular explanation, Becker showed that the difference didn't have to be big to have big effects.

In the late 1970s, Gary Becker was a widower and a single parent, pouring all his intellectual energy into "A Treatise on the Family," published in 1981. (A happy footnote: he remarried shortly before the treatise was published.) One of his aims was to understand what was happening to the institution of marriage. Divorce rates had more than doubled in the past two decades, both in the US and many European countries. It was clear that the world of marriage had changed dramatically.

Some commentators have blamed changes in divorce laws for the trend: Ronald Reagan, then Governor of California, signed a bill introducing "no fault" divorce in 1969, meaning that either partner could simply walk away from the marriage by demanding a divorce. Other states followed. But Becker knew that couldn't be the answer: if the husband wanted a divorce to run off with his mistress, "no fault" divorce didn't make it easier for him to do that, just cheaper—before "no fault" divorce, he had to get his wife's agreement, which might mean higher alimony payments. This reasoning suggests that "no fault" divorce rules wouldn't change divorce rates at all. The only thing that would change was who paid whom to get the divorce. And sure enough, although there was a brief spike in divorce rates as "no fault" divorce allowed a backlog of divorces to be processed more quickly, the legislation appears to have produced no more than a blip in a strong, steady upward trend.

Instead, the divorce revolution was driven by a more fundamental economic force: the breakdown of the traditional division of labor identified by Adam Smith. At the beginning of the 20th century, housework took many hours, and only the poorest and most desperate married women had jobs. As the decades rolled past, technological change made housework less time-consuming. It became easy—and quite common—for older women to enter the workforce after their children were grown and housework was easily manageable.

Once divorce rates first began to climb, it was no surprise that they increased dramatically. There was a rationally self-reinforcing loop at work: the more people divorced, the more divorcees—that is, potential marriage partners—you could meet. That meant that it was easier to get divorced yourself and find a new spouse.

Furthermore, once divorce started to become conceivable, women knew they could no longer think of themselves as one part of an economic unit. Rationality, you will recall, is about thinking ahead and responding to incentives. Realizing that the economic unit might break up, at which point a woman who simply specialized in having children was in serious trouble, it became rational for a woman to maintain career options as divorce insurance. In the division-of-labor world of the 1950s, unhappily married women would rationally stick it out: they had few alternatives. But as more older women were finding jobs, managing their housework more quickly with the aid of washing machines and electric irons, women started to realize that there was an alternative to an unhappy marriage. Divorce was still financially tough but it was no longer economic suicide. And then the contraceptive pill came along, making women—as we have seen—more highly educated, career-minded and employer-friendly.

Did women really need career options before they could get divorced? In all but the most desperately unhappy marriages, they did. Contrary to the popular bar-room grumbles of divorced men, alimony alone doesn't take women very far financially. Fewer than half of single divorced mothers get any child support at all, and for those who do, child support is just a few thousand dollars a year, typically about one-fifth of the mother's total income. If a woman, especially a mother, was determined to get a divorce, she almost always needed to find a job. More and more women realized that they had the ability to do exactly that.

That started a second reinforcing loop—some people regard it as a vicious circle. Because divorce was conceivable, women preserved career options. But because women had career options, divorce became conceivable. It became less and less likely that a woman would become trapped in a miserable marriage out of pure economic necessity.

A close look at the statistics backs up this story. Even today, when so many women work for fun or the enjoyment of spending the cash, women tend to work more when they face a higher risk of divorce. There are several ways to guess at that higher risk: you can look with hindsight at who did get divorced and assume that the woman involved might have seen it coming beforehand; you can look at variables such as age, religion and whether parents went through a divorce; or you can ask women how happy they are with their marriages. Whichever way you slice it, women at risk of divorce are more likely to head out for work. The increase in divorce is not because of a change in the psychology of love: it is a rational response to changed incentives.

The changing incentives also altered the way couples behaved within the relationship. In states which introduced "no fault" divorce, while divorce rates did not show a lasting increase, women knew that their husbands could walk away from the marriage without having to buy their agreement with a generous side-deal. That made it riskier to make an expensive commitment to the relationship: riskier to have children, riskier to financially support a husband through school, and riskier to become a homemaker while hubby focused on his career. The economist Betsey Stevenson explored this question using a research approach that should now be familiar, looking at the timing of the new law, state by state. And she found that when states introduced "no fault" divorce and thus gave the husband an easy escape from the marriage, wives were less likely to work while their husbands went through school, but more likely to work full- time and less likely to have children. All these effects were quite large; for each decision, between five percent and ten percent of women changed their behavior as the law changed.

A young woman in the early 1970s faced a different world to that her mother lived in two decades earlier. She could see that career opportunities for women had opened up, and there were jobs available if she wanted them. She could see, too, that divorce rates were on the rise and she should not, if she was wise, simply rely on a husband to provide her with an income, because extreme division of labor was too insecure for an age of divorce. Other women her age were marrying later, meaning that there were more men to date and marriage could be postponed. To cap it all, she had access to a safe, reliable way of postponing children until she was ready to have them, meaning she could plan for a long education and several years to establish herself in a serious, high-powered career.

This analysis links divorce, the pill and women's increasing power and achievement in the workplace in a reinforcing loop. But it would be wrong to "blame" an increase in divorce rates on an increase in women's professional achievements. There is, after all, no evidence that people are more unhappy with their marriages than in 1950. The opposite is likely to be true, because when they are unhappy with their marriages they can do something about it. One influential study by economists Andrew Oswald and Jonathan Gardner finds that divorcees, unlike widows and widowers, are happier one year after the marriage ends than they were while still married.

Perhaps a more positive way to express the trend is that women's entry into high-powered careers has given them the option to get divorced if the marriage isn't working out; and the recognition that that option is important is one of the factors encouraging women's entry into high-powered careers.

That may sound a little abstract, but economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers discovered a chilling example of the way that the increased availability of divorce empowered women. As states passed "no fault" divorce laws, women acquired a credible threat to walk out of the marriage. (The statistics suggest that many of them did not, actually, do this. But the threat is enough.) Stevenson and Wolfers show that the new laws had an unexpected—but rational—effect: by giving women an exit-option, they gave men stronger incentives to behave well inside a marriage. The result? Domestic violence fell by almost a third, and the number of women murdered by their partners fell by ten percent. Female suicide also fell. It is a reminder that the binding commitment of marriage has costs as well as benefits.

Perhaps we should celebrate divorce just a little bit more. First, we should recognize that divorce is no longer increasing. That is rational. The peak in divorce in the 1970s was not, fundamentally, caused by legal changes but by changes in the underlying economics of family life, changes which reduced the incentives to be married.

In the long run, the rational response is not for couples to marry early and marry often; it is to divorce less and marry less, too. Now that the stock of marriages has been decimated by divorce, romantic couples are moving from the boom and bust of marriage and divorce to a more stable arrangement where marriages are delayed until couples are more sure of themselves. And perhaps delayed indefinitely—two of the leading economic researchers in the field, Stevenson and Wolfers, have been a romantic couple for ten years, and remain unmarried.

While the divorce rate has been falling for three decades, it would be a shame if it fell too far. Justin Wolfers comments, "We know there exists something called an optimal divorce rate, and we're 100 percent sure it isn't zero."

The serious entry of married women into the workforce has meant that they spend a little less time baking cookies, and perhaps also that their husbands spend a little more time with the children. It has empowered them to leave marriages that are not working, making them happier and safer from abuse. It has truly been a revolution, and the price of that revolution is more divorce and less marriage. That price is very real—but it is almost certainly a price worth paying.

polygyny economics

After more than a decade of war between separatist rebels and the Russian army, there are not many marriageable men to go around in Chechnya. So, acting Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov, probably not a feminist, proposed a radical step: "Each man who can provide for four wives should do it.Polygyny (having more than one wife, as opposed to polygamy, which is having more than one spouse) is admissible under Islamic law but not Russian law, so Kadyrov is unlikely to make much progress with his proposal. But what difference would such a law make? It's natural to assume that polygyny is bad for women, partly because most of us would rather have our spouse to ourselves, and partly because we look at a place like Saudi Arabia, where polygyny is not uncommon, and note that women aren't even allowed to drive.I'm not quite so convinced. A lot of the knee-jerk reactions against polygyny are from people who can't add up. In a society with equal numbers of men and women, each man with four wives gives women the additional pick of three men—the poor saps whose potential wives decided they'd prefer one-quarter of a billionaire instead. In the Sahel region of Africa, half of all women live in polygynous households. The other half have a good choice of men and a lot more bargaining power.
it's hardly surprising that in most polygynous societies, the bride's family gets large payments in exchange for her hand in marriage. If polygyny combined with women's rights, I bet we'd see more promises to wash the dishes. Not everybody would have to share a husband, but I can think of some who might prefer half of Orlando Bloom.in a society such as Chechnya, where there is a shortage of young men, we would expect the reverse effect: Men get to pick and choose, playing the field, perhaps not bothering to get married at all. We don't have good data on Chechnya, but we have excellent information about an unexpected parallel.A little over one in 500 men are in prison—but there are several regions where one in five young black men are behind bars. Since most women marry men of a similar age, and of the same race and in the same state, there are some groups of women who face a dramatic shortfall of marriage partners.Economist Kerwin Charles has recently studied the plight of these women. Their problem is not merely that some who would want to marry won't be able to. It's that the available men—those not in prison—suddenly have more bargaining power. Goodbye to doing the dishes and paying the rent; hello to mistresses and wham, bam, thank you ma'am. The women whose potential partners have had their ranks thinned by prison are less likely to marry, and when they do marry, are likely to marry a man less educated than they are. Meanwhile, the remaining men, finding a surfeit of marriage partners, suddenly seem in no hurry to marry. And why would they?

The women's response makes sense: girl power. The women affected do everything to make the most of single life, including staying at school for longer and hunting for more paid work. The prison system hasn't left them much choice.When men are taken out of the marriage market by war or by prison, women suffer. The reverse is probably true, too: When women are taken from the marriage market, men suffer. In China, the policy of one-child families coupled with selective abortion of girls has produced "surplus" males. Such men are called "bare branches," and China could have 30 million of them by 2020. Perhaps polyandry—women with multiple husbands—would be the logical response to the situation in China. What will happen instead is that these lonely, wifeless men will end up sleeping with a relatively small number of women—prostitutes—with severe risks of sexually transmitted disease all around.
All this suggests that Kadyrov has a point about Chechnya. And perhaps the new HBO series big love will rekindle the idea further.nevertheless, I am resolutely against the practice of allowing several women to marry one man. We men are downtrodden enough already.

of coffees and feminism

i am back after a pretty long time.had my exams going and then i need to spend some time freaking out.i also am reading a lot of books which are influencing me a lot and my writings.i am writing a series of articles related to day to day life which i think u will enjoy reading.no complex economics ....just plain observations.

I’m a real cappuccino lover myself, but many of my female colleagues don’t seem to go for the stuff. I’d never thought too much about that until recently. I suppose I carelessly assumed that men and women have different tastes, probably as a result of different social influences. Now I know better: my female colleagues don’t go to coffee shops because they’re shabbily treated when they get there.

That’s the conclusion of the American economist Caitlin Knowles Myers. She, with her students as research assistants, staked out eight coffee shops in the Boston area and watched how long it took men and women to be served. Her conclusion: men get their coffee 20 seconds earlier than women. (There is also evidence that black people wait longer than white people, the young wait longer than the old, and the ugly wait longer than the beautiful. But these effects are statistically not as persuasive.)

Perhaps, says the sceptic, this is because women order froufrou drinks? Up to a point. The researchers found that men are more likely to order simpler drinks. Yet comparing fancy-drink-ordering men with fancy-drink-ordering women, the longer wait for women remained.

It is also hard to attribute the following finding to a female preference for wet-skinny-soya-machiatto with low carb marshmallows: the delays facing women were longer when the coffee shop staff was all-male, and almost vanished when the serving staff were all-female.

It is not clear whether women were held up by male staff because the men viewed them with contempt, or because male staff flirted furiously. The “contempt” explanation seems more likely, as the extra time that women wait seems to increase when the coffee shop is busy. Who would take extra time out to flirt just when the lines are longer?

This is an intriguing piece of research because coffee shops appear to be a competitive business, and one thing we think we know about discrimination is that competition should tend to erode it.

The idea comes from an article published 50 years ago by the economist and Nobel laureate Gary Becker. The reasoning is simple enough: a business that deliberately offers shoddy service or uncompetitive prices to some customers, or that turns down smart minority applicants in favour of less-qualified white male applicants, is throwing money away. If it is a government bureaucracy or a powerful monopolist, that’s a loathsome but sustainable choice. But racist or sexist businesses with many competitors are likely to be shut down by the bankruptcy courts long before the human rights lawyers get to them.

Becker’s theory is powerful, and there is evidence to back it up, too. Economists Sandra Black and Elizabeth Brainerd found that the surge in international trade, which has increased competitive pressures in many markets, has reduced the ability of firms to discriminate against women.

But what Becker cannot say is how reliable the competition mechanism is at crushing discrimination, nor how quick. (In fairness to him, economics in general has a real blind spot when it comes to the question “when?”) The research on coffee shops is an interesting curiosity: coffee retailing seems to be fiercely competitive. How can discrimination continue?

One answer, perhaps, is that a rival coffee shop would have to be very close indeed to justify a trip aimed at avoiding a 20-second wait. Even coffee retailing isn’t that competitive.

But an alternative explanation is that the market is still working on the problem. Over time we’ve moved from gentlemen’s clubs to male-dominated pubs to coffee shops, which are far more female-friendly. Perhaps it is just a matter of time before some entrepreneur decides to set up a big chain of coffee shops with “No men allowed” on the door.

after all,the kenyan people lost the election!

Kenya is entering a protracted crisis. No one really knows who actually won the presidential elections. Given the overwhelming number of parliamentary seats won by the ODM and the dismissal of some 20 former ministers who lost their seats, it seems likely that the presidential results probably followed suit. But it is no longer really a matter of who won or lost. For one thing is certain: it is the Kenyan people who have lost in these elections.

That the elections results were rigged – of that there is little doubt. The hasty inauguration, the blanket banning on the broadcast media, the dispersal of security forces to deal with expected protests – all these have given the post election period the flavour of a coup d’etat. What was not expected was the speed with which the whole thing would unravel. The declaration of the members of the Electoral Commission that the results were indeed rigged only added to the growing realisation that a coup had indeed taken place.

People across the country took to the streets to protest and were met with disproportionate use of force by the police and GSU. Emotions ran high. And there is evidence that politicians from all sides used the occasion to instigate violent attacks against their opponents constituencies. There have been rapes, forced circumcision and forced female genital mutilation. The western media has been quick to describe these as ‘ethnic clashes’ – but then they appear only to be able to see tribes whenever there are conflicts in Africa. What is ignored by them is that the security forces have been responsible for the majority of killings.

What we have in Kenya is a political crisis that could, descend into civil war if the political crisis is not resolved soon. And therein lies the problem.

There is no coherent political direction from the ODM. First Raila Odinga declares he’s the ‘people’s president’ (shades of Blair’s ‘people’s princess’ speech – the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, some might say – and says he is going to arrange to be inaugurated. What happened?

Then he says that he is not willing to meet with Kibaki, then says he will meet provided there is an international mediator. He says he will form his own government, and then takes that no further.

Then he calls for a million person march into Nairobi, and when faced with a banning order and massive police attacks, backs down and calls for another demonstration the following day.

But what is this demonstration seeking to achieve? Such events are usually a means of showing the size of popular support: but ODM has already demonstrated its popular support in the stolen elections. There are no coherent political demands for this event that would bring the support of the many who, though they may not have voted for ODM, would feel that they would nevertheless want to express their support. There is no real strategy for enabling PNU’s own political base to be won over.

The election results were rigged, sure. But the failure to demand that an independent judicial inquiry be established to investigate only leads to suspicions that even the ODM were not keen to have the results investigated. It is now probably too late to conduct a satisfactory investigation since original records may have been tampered with – which might explain the Attorney General’s sudden willingness announced today to allow the ECK records to be inspected without recourse to use of the courts.

The mass demonstrations could have been used to call for such an investigation and to protest against the media ban imposed by Kibaki and to challenge constitutionality of the ban. Instead, it served no purpose other than what some see as an infantile response to the theft of the elections.

Why has there been no public appeal to the armed forces and police – whose families have no doubt suffered in the violent upheavals – to refuse to fire on citizens, or to defend and protect citizens from the violence that has been unleashe?. Kibaki can retain power only through the use of force – and so long as the armed forces and the police remain loyal, he will be able to retain his hold on power.

ODM has failed to challenge the existing government by encouraging all sections of society to create a viable alternative to the present government.

But the real tragedy of Kenya is that the political conflict is not about alternative political programmes that could address the long standing grievances of the majority over landlessness, low wages, unemployment, lack of shelter, inadequate incomes, homelessness, etc. It is not about such heady aspirations.

No, it boils down to a fight over who has access to the honey pot that is the state. For those in control of the state machinery are free to fill their pockets. So the battle lines are reduced to which group of people are going to be chosen to fill their pockets – and citizens are left to decide perhaps that a few crumbs might fall off the table in their direction.

And the electorate – the mass of citizens who have borne the brunt of the recent violence and decades of prolonged disenfranchisement from accessing the fruits of independence – are reduced to being just being fodder for the pigs fighting over the trough.

The Kibaki regime seems unlikely to concede any space – for to do so would confirm the suspicions of election theft. And the longer that the current impasse continues, the more likely it is that people will seek to vent their anger and frustration in senseless violence – energy that could so easily be turned towards organising to building a new world.

So what is going to be the way forward? Will there be an independent inquiry into the election results? Into the violence that has taken place? Will the contending parties agree to the formation of an interim government that would oversee the re-run of the elections?

Whatever happens, the present crisis has demonstrated that there is a serious lack of any formations that can articulate a coherent political programme for social transformation. Politics will remain forever about who gets access to the trough so long as there is no alternative.

philosophy of time

The concept of time travel has tantalized mankind for as long as there has been literature, and has become especially prominent in recent decades with the rise of Science Fiction as a genre. How can a past still vivid in memory or an inevitable future be completely inaccessible to us except for the instant in which it passes, and what would happen if it was not? Various branches of physics have been trying to answer this since Einstein postulated that one could slow the passage of time by accelerating one’s self. Yet like so many other esoteric branches of science, ignoring the technicalities of achieving time travel in the first place (widely regarded to be impossible anyways), the topic lies firmly in the realm of philosophy and religion to qualify any theories.

The feasibility and nature of time travel lie in three questions:

• Is there free will?
• What does this imply about the nature of the universe?
• If that nature does not preclude time travel, what are the consequences of it?

The fundamental question to all of this is the first, for in it is vested a greater question: is there a soul - a supernatural? From a purely evolutionary and atheistic standpoint, free will cannot exist, for a human being is no more than the complex interaction of his molecules, ultimately completely predictable could we account for all the molecular motion in his body. Though the brain is so complex as to give the illusion of self-awareness and choice, it is still just an illusion and we are no more than the sum of our parts.

If, however, free will does exist, then it would imply that we are greater than the sum of our parts, self-awareness being the hallmark of having risen above being a bundle of molecules interacting in complex fashion - having a soul, so to speak, something that is separate from yet manifest in the matter comprising the body.

So what does this mean for time travel? The first case - one of pure determinism - means that any human endeavor, no matter how complex or grandiose, is nothing more than the inevitable emergence of high-level order from the force with which the universe began long ago. Time travel then would then not be something creatable by mankind, for we cannot affect the universe in any proactive way. If this is the case, then any paradox caused by time travel chanced upon by wormhole or other natural methods would necessarily be inconsequential, meaning that one cannot change the past because will have already been changed (unless you’re bill gates, in which case your salary has sufficient mass to distort space-time to your bidding). And in the case that time travel is the intersection of parallel universes at different points, then any change in the past will not affect the future in which one travelled there, your presence in the other inevitable anyway. Changes made in a deterministic universe cannot be recursive.

If however, we do have free will and our will is formed outside the physical realm, then we do have the capability of affecting the universe in a substantiative way. Assuming time travel is possible, only in the case of the existence of souls could one build a “time machine”, so to speak, and cause the universe to behave in ways it otherwise would not. It is only in this case that a recursive paradox could exist: Since alternate universes are inherently deterministic being probabilistic, their presence precludes the existence of the supernatural, at least dwelling in us, so our universe is all we have to deal with. Time travel of any sort then, assuming the existence of the soul, is necessarily impossible, if we are to assume cause-and-effect are inherent to the nature of time-space (rather than artificially introduced by a deity, as one would draw a flip book - in which case we are still determined beings, only by a different determinant).

One’s views on time travel and physics is then dependent on one’s fundamental philosophic and religious assumptions. As in universal origins, the question for each of us is which set of assumptions we will start from: Will our views on the nature of the universe affect our belief or lack thereof in the soul, or will we draw our views on the nature of the universe from our belief in the soul?