The Economist | Big economic ideas: Breakthroughs and brickbats

One of the interesting things with my new job, son, is that I'm immediately pitched straight and deep into macro and micro economics. Quite an interesting situation. I've got to help figure out how to help direct taxpayers money to firms and sectors which can export more and better and perhaps even for the first time.

Exporting more has a direct implication on our country's economic prosperity and therefore our happiness. In other words, my job is to make our companies successful by exporting. So I will be delving deep into these (and other theories) all over again.

In most of the cases, it's basic hygiene factors which are missing and we forget them. Information. Risk management. Removal of barriers. Improvement in pricing. Right incentives. Education.

I thought of sending this to you as you still have one year to go but then if you had to recommend a target for a merger, these economic theories come into the picture so you might want to keep an eye out.

Did I mention how proud I am of you? I saw you rushing out today to go to work and I was telling mamma. Just a few years back, his worry was pickachu or what game to play. And now he's all grown up. I'm actually surprised and very impressed how well you've picked up good working habits. This level of work is very very rare and you, my son, are doing it very well.

But the role of internship is not just to get a job. It's also to let you know if you do want to do this job. We just want you to be happy and achieve your goals. If you want to be an investment banker fine. If you want to become an academic fine. We just want you to be happy and will support you as much as we can and more.

Love you son.

Baba




http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21702469-what-economists-can-learn-disciplines-seminal-papers-breakthroughs-and-brickbats?frsc=dg%7Cc

Trying out the English Longbow

We went to Portsmouth and besides having a great time, we tested out some long bows.

There were two longbows there, one with a 40pound pull and another with a 90 pound pull, both of us were unable to pull it to the full extent. The actual pull required back in those days was 170 pounds.

and then i came across this little documentary showing how a longbow is made. it was just so mesmerising, i tell you.
The Birth Of A Weapon. Part I. English longbow making. from John Neeman Tools on Vimeo.

Is fiction good for you? How researchers are trying to find out

the answer is yes :)

see here for more details.

It's assumed that reading fiction is good for your mental health, but evidence linking Jane Eyre or Anna Karenina to a broadened mind has been mostly anecdotal. In a Review published on July 19 in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, a psychologist-novelist delves into that issue, arguing that reading or watching narratives may encourage empathy. By exploring the inner lives of characters on the page, readers can form ideas about others' emotions, motives, and ideas, off the page.
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Marie von Clausewitz: The Woman behind the Making of On War.

Kannu
I've told you many times that one of the key things a good leader knows about are logistics. And of course strategy. Both are refined to a giant extent in the war studies arena. And my Phd at the department of war studies at King's college helped me tremendously. The book by Clausewitz, On War, is a seminal book on this subject. In a few years, do try to read it son. It would be useful for you to learn from the master of war on how to wage war, the strategy and logistics. Amazing book. 
And then this book review talks about a different aspect, his wife. As you read the review, you can see how she manages to work with him, set fire to his ideas, encourage and challenge him, kick him when required, cuddle him when needed. 
You don't have to have a wife like that although if you are lucky, you will get somebody like that, somebody who is ferociously intelligent, somebody who is challenging you, kicks you when you need it, cuddles you when you need it. You know the tests to know if you've found her? Does she challenge you? Does she make you think? Does she make you laugh? And have you cried in her arms? It could be your wife, your sister, your mother, your girlfriend, your friend, doesn't matter and can be a combination even but be on the lookout for girls like that. They are rarer than gold. Of course you have to do the same thing to her. Challenge her. Encourage her. Make her feel like a queen. Make her laugh. Cuddle and kiss her. If you can do that, brilliant. You have a problem son, you are very intelligent and you are also sensitive and emotional. And ambitious.  Rare combination. You need a rare girl to be with you.  
If that meshes, great. I'm sure you will find her. Keep on the lookout son. 
But I'm so proud of you. I see you heading off to work. Working so hard. Asking questions. Very impressed son. 
Love you
Baba


H-Net Reviews
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=45568
(via Instapaper)

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Vanya Eftimova Bellinger. Marie von Clausewitz: The Woman behind the Making of On War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 312 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-022543-8.
Reviewed by Jill S. Russell (King's College London)
Published on H-War (March, 2016)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey

On Marie
Opening new vistas to military and strategic history's most famous man, in The Woman behind the Making of On War, Vanya Eftimova Bellinger uses Marie von Clausewitz's letters and her marital relationship to demonstrate Marie's material role in Carl von Clausewitz's thinking and writing of his foundational work in strategy. As a biography based around the writings of the subject, Bellinger's work compares favorably to Clair Tomalin's Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self (2002), as the latter imbued the story of the man with substance by way of his own words. In this book, the narrative sustains Bellinger's essential argument of Marie's critical place in this most famous piece of writing on strategy specifically. Along the way, deeper points regarding military and historical scholarship, strategy, and polities emerge. Although many will make On War the focus of this biography, that work of strategy figures only as the denouement of the Clausewitzes' lives. Given the biography's importance on two important levels, this review will address Marie's story both on its own written terms and in its comment on and place within military history as well as the practice and scholarship on strategy that have been built on it.
Consider first the text itself. Without intending to minimize it, the aim of this work is simple: to judge the influence of the "mundane" on a historic volume. In this case, for a woman like Marie, who commanded the respect of generals, the mundane became transformative, as her biography in total demonstrates her clear place in On War. And it is such attention to the quotidian that both I and Earl Wavell appreciate as a focus of study. Who was Marie? Bellinger sums her up as "a restless spirit and a politically active woman who often challenged societal conventions, spoke her mind, and lived an industrious life often independent of her husband's," even as she was until very recently still thought of as nothing particularly more than his wife (p. 5). The rich narrative that Bellinger crafts from the new correspondence and other contemporary sources sustains this characterization and our recognition of her achievements.

Islam’s Forgotten Booklovers - The Los Angeles Review of Books

You know what I regret? Well. I regret so many things but one of the things I regret is that I didn't spend enough time or have an inclination to learn languages. It just doesn't compute that well in my head. So I have to rely on brute force to learn other languages. But my desire to learn Farsi and Italian is still there. One day I will do so. And that will allow me to read books in that language. And that will allow me to browse books in shops in those countries. It's very frustrating to be in those bookshops and see all those wonderful books but cannot identify with them. They are so close but yet so far. Very frustrating. 
But the holiday im going with Diya is going to be a dream come true. Living in a library can you imagine? It will be so much fun. I'm looking forward to it. And when I read this article, I knew I was talking to a kindred spirit. That's exactly what I do. Buy books and then some more and more. But I'm trying to make sure I read some of the books I've bought :) 
Love
Baba



Islam's Forgotten Booklovers - The Los Angeles Review of Books
https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/islams-forgotten-booklovers/
(via Instapaper)

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THOUGH I'VE NEVER BEEN to Baghdad, where Muslim booklovers gathered on al-Mutanabbi Street till a huge car bomb exploded there in March 2007, I've visited most other countries of the Middle East. And everywhere I've been, I've sought out shops, stalls, and roadside stacks of books. My earliest encounter with the booksellers of the Middle East came on a visit to Istanbul as a 17-year-old. Used to spending weekends browsing the dank Victorian bookshops of the Midlands, I stumbled upon a book market in a caravanserai, the Sahaflar Çarşisi. Centuries earlier it had been a Byzantine paper mart. Though I couldn't even read their titles back then, their covers looked so bright and beautiful. I bought a crimson Qur'an with a traditional ornamented case-binding and for the next month carried it all over Europe by train. A couple of years later, I visited Delhi for the first time. Seven hundred years before Lutyens rebuilt it for the Raj, Delhi was the shelter of literary refugees fleeing the Mongol invasion of Persia. There, in the crowded gullies around the Sufi shrine of Nizam al-Din, I found a copy of a book I had kept out on loan for much of my first year in college: R.A. Nicholson's edition of Rumi's Dīvān-i Shams-i Tabrīzī. Though Rumi hadn't fled to Delhi — his family instead escaped the Mongols westwards to Asia Minor — his poems have been read, and sung, in Nizam al-Din's shrine there for centuries. I carried that copy of the Dīvān around for another summer by train.

Fwd: As A Poor Kid From The Rust Belt, Yale Law School Brought Me Face-to-face With Radical Inequality

Kannu

I really liked this essay. And thought you might appreciate it given that you are in a bit of a similar situation, son. The son of an immigrant who is a son of a very poor refugee and while education is good in our family, the money part wasnt there for a very long period of time. Plus you studying in Oxford, one of the premier universities in the world, much older than Yale, does have an issue, but not sure if you see a similar situation there. I find myself, in many cases, almost being a bit quiet about you going to Oxford specially when speaking to others who arent there. Quite strange. Dont get me wrong, I am bursting with pride about how smart and handsome and hard working you are while being very grounded. You are not shoving it in others faces, your friends are still the old friends from a variety of backgrounds and you are still the cute wonderful son that I fell in love with when you were born. But just like I am, in many ways, so different from others, you will face this situation as well. You will have to find out your own route for this just like I did, but it was interesting to see how this chap handled it.

Love

Baba.



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/yale-law-school-inequality_us_5772a27ee4b0dbb1bbbc11b9



As A Poor Kid From The Rust Belt, Yale Law School Brought Me Face-to-face With Radical Inequality

"I have never felt out of place in my entire life. But I did at Yale."

 06/29/2016 09:11 am ET | Updated 1 day ago  

J.D. Vance

Author, 'Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis'


This post is excerpted from Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.

During my first round of law school applications, I didn't even apply to Yale, Harvard, or Stanford—the mystical "top three" schools. I didn't think I had a chance at those places. More important, I didn't think it mattered; all lawyers get good jobs, I assumed. I just needed to get to any law school, and then I'd do fine: a nice salary, a respectable profession, and the American Dream. Then my best friend, Darrell, ran into one of his law school classmates at a popular D.C. restaurant. She was bussing tables, simply because that was the only job available to her. On the next round, I gave Yale and Harvard a try.

I didn't apply to Stanford—one of the very best schools in the country—and to know why is to understand that the lessons I learned as a kid were sometimes counterproductive. Stanford's law school application wasn't the standard combination of college transcript, LSAT score, and essays. It required a personal sign-off from the dean of your college: You had to submit a form, completed by the dean, attesting that you weren't a loser.

I didn't know the dean of my college at Ohio State. It's a big place. I'm sure she is a lovely person, and the form was clearly little more than a formality. But I just couldn't ask. I had never met this person, never taken a class with her, and, most of all, didn't trust her. Whatever virtues she possessed as a person, she was, in the abstract, an outsider. The professors I'd selected to write my letters had gained my trust. I listened to them nearly every day, took their tests, and wrote papers for them. As much as I loved Ohio State and its people for an incredible education and experience, I could not put my fate in the hands of someone I didn't know. I tried to talk myself into it. I even printed the form and drove it to campus. But when the time came, I crumpled it up and tossed it in the garbage. There would be no Stanford Law for J.D.

The hell of Serra Pelada mines, 1980s

Gold is a funny old metal kids. Because of our culture and history and what have you, it's hold on our imaginations is ferocious. Even rich people go crazy when they hold gold in their hands. I was at the Bank of England museum where they have a bar of gold which you can touch and it's a strange feeling when that happens. You feel a strange feeling of envy and avarice. You want to own it. And want to have more of it. I didn't feel good about myself. I thought that I didn't have greed or lust for gold but that brought it up. 
There's an old Indian story about this farmer who finds 9 pots buried on his land. And he is giddy with delight as he opens up the pots one by one and shows to his wife. And keeps on doing so till he reaches the last one. And he sees that it's only half full. And he then falls into a depression and wants to fill it up. And he sells his stuff. His land. And and just to fill up the last pot. His happiness and wealth just goes off. That's what gold does. 
Pearl s Buck, who wrote one of the best novels in history, the good earth, died a few days back. And the story talks about a peasant who then becomes rich and how his family works out. It's a really touching and moving story. Wealth and gold is a dual edged sword. Greed can inflict anybody. 
Look at the amazing photographs. It's like hell on earth with pain, mud, sweat, gold, murder, wealth, drugs, sex, greed, lust, all mixed up in an unholy mixture. What do you do? You just watch and wonder. 
Hope your days are going well son. I'm not able to speak to you even though you're at home and I miss you. Hopefully this weekend I'll get a chance to know how you're going through. Don't forget what I said about the suit son. Hang it up. It keeps it shape. 
Choti, I was quite impressed by your exposition on free markets on the animal kingdom or crossing or what have you game. It was very exciting how you were selling and buying there. Hope your cough gets better soon and sorry for having given the cough and cold to you :) 
Love
Baba



The hell of Serra Pelada mines, 1980s
http://rarehistoricalphotos.com/hell-serra-pelada-1980s/
(via Instapaper)

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Serra Pelada was a large gold mine in Brazil.

During the early 1980s, tens of thousands of prospectors flocked to the Serra Pelada site.

Serra Pelada was a large gold mine in Brazil 430 kilometres (270 mi) south of the mouth of the Amazon River. In 1979 a local child swimming on the banks of a local river found a 6 grams (0.21 oz) nugget of gold. Soon word leaked out and by the end of the week a gold rush had started. During the early 1980s, tens of thousands of prospectors flocked to the Serra Pelada site, which at its peak was said to be not only the largest open-air gold mine in the world, but also the most violent.
At first the only way to get to the remote site was by plane or foot. Miners would often pay exorbitant prices to have taxis drive them from the nearest town to the end of a dirt track; from there, they would walk the remaining distance—some 15 kilometers (9.3 mi) to the site. Huge nuggets were quickly discovered, the biggest weighing nearly 6.8 kilograms (15 lb), $108,000 at the 1980 market price ( now $ 310,173 in 2016). During the peak of the gold rush the mine was known for appalling conditions and violence, whilst the town that grew up beside it was notorious for both murder and prostitution.
Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado traveled to the mines of Serra Pelada taking some of the most haunting pictures of the workers there, highlighting the sheer madness and chaos of the operation. He's quoted as saying when he saw the mine, "Every hair on my body stood on edge. The Pyramids, the history of mankind unfolded. I had traveled to the dawn of time".
This is how Sebastião Salgado describes the mine during an interview in 1992:
Swept along by the winds that carry the hint of fortune, men come to the gold mine of Serra Pelada. No one is taken there by force, yet once they arrive, all become slaves of the dream of gold and the need to stay alive. Once inside, it becomes impossible to leave.

Every time a section finds gold, the men who carry up the loads of mud and earth have, by law, the right to pick one of the sacks they brought out. And inside they may find fortune and freedom. So their lives are a delirious sequence of climbs down into the vast hold and climbs out to the edge of the mine, bearing a sack of earth and the hope of gold.
Anyone arriving there for the first time confirms an extraordinary and tormented view of the human animal : 50,000 men sculpted by mud and dreams. All that can be heard are murmurs and silent shouts, the scrape of shovels driven by human hands, not a hint of a machine. It is the sound of gold echoing through the soul of its pursuers.

Because they work in mud, the gold diggers were called "mud hogs".

Because of the use of mercury in the gold extraction process large areas around the mine are considered dangerously contaminated.

The discovery of gold in Serra Pelada was unlike any other area on Earth, there was evidence that the gold formed supergenetically (meaning the gold was enriched near the surface by circulation of rain water) which is unique to the Amazon gold deposits. To this day the process of supergene enrichment is still unexplained. The best hypothesis so far is that rain water mixes with the decaying organic matter of the Amazon forest making the water acidic. This acidic water then becomes a ligand (an ionic network which gold can bond to and therefore be transported by) for gold molecules which then penetrate the ground and eventually accumulate to form an enriched gold zone. Some of the largest gold nuggets in the world formed in these areas.
In the pictures, there can be seen a lot of blocky areas, this is actually because for each miner it was assigned a 2mx2m area. People would just dig down (because that's all they could do). This became a safety hazard because they didn't know if the person who was assigned the 2mx2m lot next to them was still alive and digging down on their area. If they weren't digging, then all the block around them would go deeper and deeper until that persons block became structurally unsafe and would collapse, killing workers it collapsed on.

Rehabilitating the Spirituality of Pre-Islamic Arabia:On the Importance of the Kahin, the Jinn , and theTribal Ancestral Cult

this was a fascinating article. I always thought that the pre-islamic Arabia was not worthy of interest, but then, thinking more about it, a religion which has been formalised has to arise from a previous body of work. Looking at it in another way, Judaism/Christianity/Islam are sects of the same religion, they worship the same god, the rituals follow through, the prophets are common, and so on and so forth. So why assume that the pre-Islamic Arabs were not spiritual? they were as much or as little spiritual as the Islamic Arabs, just that they believed in more gods.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9809.12383/epdf

This article brings into focus the misunderstood and oft-ignored pre-Islamicspirituality of, primarily, the Hejaz and their religious leaders, the kahins, oftenuncharitably translated as soothsayers. A combination of factors has limiteddiscussion of pre-Islamic religion, including the persistent rejection by Muslims ofpre-Islamic history as a time of ignorance (jahiliyyah) and a Judaeo-Christian biasin Western scholarship. From the perspectives of anthropology and comparativereligion, certain conclusions about pre-Islamic spirituality can be derived. Mostimportant among these is that the pre-Islamic Arabs engaged in clearly religiouspractices revolving around the importance of the tribe and its members, living anddead. This article will hopefully spark a renewed interest in the study of thespirituality and religion of the pre-Islamic Arabs.

How Sharia Courts actually lead to lack of industrial development

this was a fascinating paper. I never figured that this could be a reason behind the Arabic world falling behind in industrial development...there you go, one more reason to consider having secular commercial courts. 

I quote

The courts of 17th and 18th century Istanbul were Sharia courts grounded in Islamic law and tradition, not unlike the courts that are gaining sway in today's Middle East. At the start of the project, Kuran and co-author Jared Rubin of Chapman University knew the courts were heavily biased in favor of men, titled elites and Muslims. By contrast, they strictly punished women, commoners and religious minorities such as Christians and Jews.
Yet as he reviewed the records, Kuran noticed that the very groups the courts favored -- Muslims, men and high-status individuals -- paid significantly higher interest rates for loans. Conversely, society's less fortunate -- women, commoners and religious minorities -- paid lower interest rates.
The reason? Because the courts went easy on Muslims, men and titled elites, lenders could not count on recouping their money and loaning to those groups became a high-risk proposition. Lenders responded by charging privileged individuals higher interest rates to cover their risk.
"The biases of the courts made it risky to lend to privileged groups," Kuran says. "The courts gave privileged groups incentives to break contracts. Judicially favored groups paid more for credit precisely because their promises were relatively less credible."
Men in particular paid significantly higher interest rates than women -- as much as 26 percent more, the study states. Women represented a better credit risk precisely because courts held them accountable, Kuran says. Also, women of the time were not free to travel alone, much less flee their creditors. Men, by contrast, represented a flight risk.
The findings help shed light on the contemporary Middle East, Kuran says. For one, they help explain why the once-prosperous region fell behind Europe economically, a lag from which the region is still recovering, he says.
As the Industrial Revolution took off in the 18th and 19th centuries and factories began springing up across Britain and Europe, access to capital became increasingly important, Kuran says.
Across Britain and Europe, industrialization was financed by wealthy investors who could secure large loans. Istanbul was a thriving commercial center at the time. The high interest rates faced by the city's elites help explain why a similar industrial expansion was slower to take root there.
"To succeed in mass production, one needed much more capital than in the past," Kuran says. "So it became a handicap to face very high borrowing costs."

Behold the ‘lowest rates in 5,000 years’

read and wonder.