Sriya Iyer on the economics of Indian religious riots

Half a century ago, an American economist, George Akerlof,  spent a year in India. He wrote a paper about the Caste system which, though it contributed nothing to our emic understanding of Varna or Jati, did add something which has proved useful to Economic theory. In his Nobel lecture, Akerlof says 'What I learned in India became the keystone for my later contributions to the development of an efficiency wage theory of unemployment in Western countries.'

By contrast, the field of 'Economics of Religion' has added nothing to either economic theory or our understanding of Religion. Indeed, the utter failure of Weberian theory was one reason why 'Institutional Economics' came into disrepute, though- no doubt- the Myrdal's abysmal oeuvre played a part as well.

Why? If Ackerlof could gain a new insight by looking at caste, why hasn't any economist contributed anything valuable to Economic Theory by looking at Religion?

Is there something about Religion which makes Economics screw up when it tries to analyze it?

The answer comes in two parts. Firstly, the project is foolish and based on ignorance, secondly it attracts ignorant fools.

Why is the thing foolish? The answer is that Econ supervenes on Religion, by the latter's account, but the reverse is not the case. Thus, Religion- at least, that of the Greek Orthodox Church- distinguishes between economia- an idiographic, accommodative, practice of Governance- and akrebia- a more rigid, nomothetic, rules based prescriptive approach.  Aristotle had warned that it is a mistake to seek for a greater akrebia in analysis than the subject matter permits. The result is bound to be foolish. Similarly, Indic Religions differentiate between Artha and Moksha. There is no hermeneutic merging of horizons between them. Thus, there can be no semantic supervenience relationship between the two. Thus neither can really say much about each other.

Turning to our modern 'Positive Economics', we find, from its own self-defintion, that it can't have a theory of Religion. Why? No scarcity obtains. That which is the goal of Religious activity is non rival, non excludable, involves no production or utility function and is wholly independent of preferences, endowments & coordination mechanisms. Norms and Values and Doxastic exchanges aren't like commodities. It is a different matter that there may be mimetic rivalry. What there can't be is scarcity related opportunity cost.

This is not to say that activities described as motivated by Religion are not economic. However such actions are similar to those motivated by Politics, Aesthetics, Scientific inquiry, Athletic or Sporting accomplishment- indeed any normative or thymotic field of activity. However all activities of this type- provided they involve scarce resources or occur on an uncertain fitness landscape- can be described in the same way as any biological or otherwise co-evolved behavior. One may speak of coordination and discoordination games and pooling or separating equilibria on the basis of either 'cheap talk' or 'costly signals'. There is no point having a separate 'Economics of Religion' because the boundary between  Religion and Politics- or Aesthetics or purely Thymotic or Commercial activity- is impossible to draw. Indeed, Religion itself harps on this topic constantly. There are always money-changers in the temple or else there is spiritual evil in high places. Every Crusader abides the question- is she really a Conquistador?-  as must every Paraclete the infirmity of suspicion that they but prostitute a virtue they do not possess.

Sriya Iyer has written a review article which, she claims, ' identifies some of the most important developments in the economics of religion in the last couple of decades, notably,

(1) new developments in theoretical models including spatial models of religious markets and evolutionary models of religious preferences and traits;

In other words, some third rate hacks have misapplied ideas from useful fields to a subject in which their opinions are guaranteed to have no influence. Which religiously minded person will turn to an academic economist (i.e. the stupidest type of that variety of cretin) for guidance or enlightenment on any spiritual or theological matter? One may as well ask an anchorite for guidance on portfolio choice.

(2) empirical work which addresses innovatively matters concerning econometric identification in examining causal influences on religious behavior;

These cretins don't know what causes religious behavior. If they did they could have set up a lucrative cult, like Scientology, but which uses the Economist's jargon. Alternatively, if they are altruists, they could have figured out a way to help people in despair, or those struggling to beat addiction, or other such unfortunates who claim to benefit from religious consolation.

The fact that they don't do it shows they don't know how it is done. Thus they can't identify causes. Since they are shite econometricians, using invalid instruments, they can write nonsense of a click-bait variety or for a purely propagandistic purpose as Sriya Iyer herself has done.

(3) new research in the economic history of religion that considers religion as an independent rather than as a dependent variable;

If it is truly independent then it can't show up in 'the economic history' of anything. There will be no hysteresis effects and no co-evolved processes.

 and (4) more studies of religion outside the Western world.

by people who know neither the Western world nor whichever shit-hole their parents managed to escape from by completely ignoring or reversing the prescriptions of its indigenous religious or moral regime.

Why is this utterly shite branch of the subject still burgeoning? To answer this question, let us look at the following excerpt from a new book titled 'The Economics of Religion in India' by Sriya Iyer which has been published in Quartz magazine.

We can think of religious riots in India as one example of a broader class of riots that are categorized as “ethnoreligious conflicts”—defined as conflicts that involve ethnic groups that are distinguished from each other by their religions.

Ethnoreligious conflicts are characterized by some or all of the following features
1) Forcible conversion or suppression of religious practices
2) Ethnic cleansing or deprivation of civil and political rights
3) Transfer of property and other assets- including nubile women- from one community to another
4) Persistent theological denunciation of the other sect as being a path to damnation

By contrast riots can occur between followers of different sports teams or flare up because of gang rivalry or as a response to police action. London saw severe 'hoodie riots' after a gangster was shot by the police. Criminal gangs, using blackberry phones, coordinated a youth revolt which degenerated into a looting spree involving large scale arson.

More usually, riots arise out of political demonstrations in which a fringe element engages in mayhem so as to attract publicity and put pressure on the administration. The 1990 poll tax riots, in the UK, which brought down Thatcher, or the 'yellow vests' in Macron's France are examples. The dilemma posed by such riots is that repression may push the 'silent majority' down the road to militancy. No Government can lock up a sizable portion of the electorate. By contrast, a very large demonstration- e.g. the anti-Iraq War 'Not in my name' protest- which involves no rioting, may have no impact on political decision making. Violence, here, is a proxy for 'preference intensity'. Non-violence is dismissed as 'virtue signalling'.

India's post-independence communal riots are more like this purely political type of riot save in Kashmir where ethnic cleansing of Pundits has actually occurred.

The occurrence and virulence of riots is a function of policing policy and resources and can be instrumentalized for political purposes. It can also represent a type of vigilantism- 'teaching a lesson' to a turbulent or criminal minority, or 'sending a message' to an economically dominant coalition. However, this does not amount to 'ethnoreligious' conflict. Why? Because the follow-through is absent. Ethnic cleansing does not actually occur. The civil and political rights of the targeted community are not curbed. Their religion is not suppressed or denounced as satanic.

Sriya Iyer is wrong to think the sort of communal riots she speaks of are 'ethnoreligious conflicts' rather than breakdowns in public order similar to football riots. Why? Because the Hindu majority areas of India have not gone in for systematic ethnic cleansing. There has been a political instrumentalization of riots of various types. But this does not represent ethnoreligious conflict. The Party orchestrating the rioting can draw support from the targeted community. Zail Singh was President at the time of the anti-Sikh riots. Congress is currently in power in Punjab under a Sikh C.M who stayed loyal back then. Similarly, in Gujarat, the Patidar agitation- though ostensibly against the incumbent administration- did not really represent a rejection of it. Rather, this was a show of strength designed to affect the balance of power within competing political parties so as to secure reservations for Patels.

On the other hand, Gujarat has also seen riots which are 'anti-national' in the sense of featuring the involvement of a 'foreign hand'.

 The Shahrukh Khan film 'Raees' gives the background to a bizarre situation where a Muslim Minister, belonging to the Congress Party, uses a Muslim bootlegger to get hold of bombs from the Pakistani ISI to stage a terrorist incident so as to spark off riots. Later the Minister and another Muslim politician arranged to have a honest Muslim MP killed. This attracted the ire of the then Home Minister. 'Raees' fled to Pakistan, but after falling out with Dawood Ibrahim, returned to India. However the police, who had been on his pay-roll, killed him.

All this is common knowledge. But not for Sriya Iyer. Why? She is part of an academic availability cascade whose imbecility can be instrumentalized in a hypocritical manner by the most worthless sort of public intellectual. These guys get to pretend that a side-effect of Economic Growth is Rioting. This is junk Social Science. Why? The 'Structural Causal Model' is silly. If two things are meaningfully correlated then we can increase one thing to increase the other thing or vice versa. Smoking and cancer are correlated. Reducing smoking reduces cancer. Smoking may be statistically correlated with rising income but it isn't caused by it. When China's economic upsurge began, smoking increased a lot and, I suppose, this raised cancer risk. But reducing disposable income by reducing economic growth is not the solution to the problem.

During the Cuban 'famine' of the Nineties, health incomes improved. But it is not food availability deficit which is correlated with better health but, rather, increased exercise and the substitution of organically grown vegetables and fruits for higher calorie processed foods.

All this is common sense. But that is an uncommon commodity among academic economists. It is individually rational for them to publish 'politically correct' junk social science even though, collectively, it reduces the prestige of their discipline. This type of Economic analysis has a 'negative externality' for Economics as a more or less prestigious subject for study at the University level.

The data for 1950-2006 show that there were about 30 religious riots each year in India.
On average, 212 people were killed each year, and almost 600 injured. There is also considerable variation in riots and growth across the Indian states. For example, in 2006, while Punjab had virtually no riots, the affluent state of Gujarat had about six riots.

Thus, riots in India are idiographic and reflect localized politics. 'Affluence' or its lack is irrelevant. In any case, it is misleading to speak of Gujarat as 'affluent'. It is still very poor by First World standards. Iyer should say 'in 2006, Gujarat had six riots while Punjab, which has a comparable per capita income, had none. Thus, in India, there is no correlation whatsoever between religious violence and Economic conditions. To argue otherwise would be like saying, in Punjab, you can smoke as much as you like without increasing your cancer risk. In Gujarat the reverse is the case. Smoking does not cause cancer. Living in Gujarat does.'

The damage in terms of property and prosperity must be on a similar scale; so too must the harm done to inter-religious networks throughout the country.

Why must it? Economics knows of no such law. Iyer is living in England. She could inquire about the hoodie riots. How much damage in terms of 'property and prosperity' did they actually do? Did the City of London haemorrhage talent as Capital fled to safer harbors? Did the Sikh and Muslim shopkeepers who confronted the hoodies to protect their shops harm 'inter-religious networks' in the City? If so, how come London has a Muslim Mayor?

The intensity of such riots, puzzlingly, has shown no sign of abating despite India’s recent and accelerating economic growth.

'Accelerating'? Which planet is Iyer living on?

Who, in India, is puzzled by any riot- intense or otherwise? We know almost immediately who is instrumentalizing it and what the political purpose is. In the case of Godhra, there was an external security threat. That is why Delhi intervened, sending in not just troops, who were prepared to fire on fellow Hindus because they believed the whole thing was a Pakistani plot designed to harm our defensive posture in the Rann of Kutch, but also a senior Police Chief to break the link between the corrupt police SHO and the land-shark, bootlegger etc. Modi was supposed to be the scapegoat but because no one was in a hurry to replace him, he turned things around by lifting curfew early and then by his smart handling of the Akshardam terrorist attack. The forbearance of the Swami Narayan sect was a big help.

Everything I am saying can be verified by a 10 minute Google search. Iyer, however, has to rely on highly partisan academic sources because she is a highly partisan academic herself. She hopes to be the West's 'talking head' to be trundled into TV studios anytime there is a riot back home. It is a dirty job, but someone has to do it- and better it is done by an Iyer rather than those damned Iyengars who accuse us of putting garlic in the sambar.

For example, the riots in 2002 in Gujarat are an acute reminder of this. In two and a half months of violence, normal life came to a standstill, and close to 400 people, most of them Muslims, were killed in the capital alone. The state-wide death toll of the riots, though disputed, is estimated to have been 1,050.

If normal life came to a standstill, how come there was scarcely any impact on growth? If anything, it increased because Modi managed things much more smartly than anyone suspected was possible. But, the context should be borne in mind. Both the Home Ministry and the Defense Ministry were convinced this was a Pakistani plot. This meant soldiers would shoot fellow Hindus if ordered to do so. Corrupt policemen understood this was not 'business as usual', though no doubt the Sanjiv Bhatt type of vermin played a waiting game. It backfired in his case because the voters, not the 'public intellectuals', prevailed. Barkha Dutt is now spitting bile at Kapil Sabil over the folding of his Tiranga TV that was supposed to relaunch her career. How the mighty have fallen!

Events such as this outline the importance of a deeper understanding of the mechanisms behind religious riots (specifically, what determines rioting behavior) and the effects of rioting on economic growth. As macroeconomic theory suggests that riots affect economic growth and growth affects the chance of riots, we must first examine what causes riots.
[…]

Macroeconomic theory does not suggest that riots affect economic growth. During the hoodie riots in London, no Macro-economist- and London is plentifully supplied with them- said 'OMG, this is gonna blow a hole in my UK growth estimate.' Iyer is talking nonsense.

Why 'examine what causes riots'? We could just watch 'Raees' on Netflix instead. Economists simply don't have the tools to model anything so complicated.

An economic approach to religious rioting
To develop a framework within which to examine rioting, I view religious riots, as suggested first by E Glaeser, as an act of hatred and an extreme form of religious participation or attendance.

This is utterly foolish. Extreme hatred can't be appeased by anything less than full ethnic cleansing. Hindu majority areas of India have shown no evidence of any such thing. There has been thoroughgoing ethnic cleansing in non-Hindu majority areas of the sub-continent.

Iyer is from a Hindu background. She may know of other Iyers who spend a lot of time going to teerths & Temples and taking darshan of Gurus and Acharyas and so forth. Do they really have a greater proclivity for rioting than their less religious neighbors? In India, participation in rioting may be related to whether one comes from a 'martial' or dominant land owning caste. It may also correlate to lower socio-economic origins. It is definitely correlated to previous criminal activity.

Iyer probably knows that her fellow Iyers- or other educationally advanced Brahmins, Jains etc- are  not more inclined to violence as a result of attendance at congregational worship. However, they may harbor the suspicion that Muslims are whipped up to a frenzy by their Mullahs in the mosques.

Consider what happened when the Iyers' pontiff was imprisoned on a murder charge. Did they riot? Suppose their pontiff had urged them to do so. Would they have obeyed?

Iyer is of Indian origin. Why is she writing as though the country and its people are utterly alien to her? Why has Quartz excerpted this from her book? Its readership is mainly Hindu and upper caste. We all have relatives who are pious. Do they run out of their temples or prayer halls baying for blood?

The Glaeser model is very important for economic studies of religious conflict, as it provides a unique framework within which to consider the decision to riot.

Glaeser is good on urban economics in advanced countries. His model is useless when applied to India because of missing markets & differences in Public Service provision.

This decision is similar to the decision to attend a sermon, in that both involve costs of time sacrificed for religious activity. Rioting, as a manifestation of hatred, is also determined by economic, historic, political, and psychological grievances.

Wow! This Iyer thinks that when an Iyer decides to listen to a sermon she is making exactly the same type of decision as when she decides to riot. That is why our widowed grandmothers are constantly rioting when they are not listening to sermons. It is a terrible social problem. Kindly ensure that your granny gets a well paid job so as to curb her criminal activities.

Rioting involves raping and looting and settling scores and gaining a rep as a hard man which affects future earning from extortion and contract enforcement. If there is good Governance, then it also involves substantial penalties. This is what curbs the underlying phenomena. Where there is genuine hatred, democratic politics permits ethnic cleansing of a systematic type. Consider the plight of Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Look what happened to non-Sunnis under the Caliphate. Rioting is an inefficient way to get rid of those you hate. The Rwandan genocide wasn't a riot. It was systematic butchery.

These non-economic determinants provide us with instruments that can be used in the econometric analysis presented in this chapter.

An instrument is invalid if it has no causal connection with whatever it correlates to. If it has a causal connection, then there is a genuine Structural Causal Model. This means there is a policy prescription at the end of the analysis- stuff like reduce smoking to reduce cancer. What possible policy prescription could Iyer's idiocy produce?

In their pioneering work on the economics of religion, C Azzi and R Ehrenberg included afterlife consumption, determined by time dedicated to time-intensive religious activities, as a component of the household’s utility. An increase in wage rates, by increasing the opportunity cost of time, decreases religious participation.

It may increase intensity of religious participation more than proportionately. Furthermore, participation may be classed as 'psychogogia' or entertainment rather than 'methexis'- as Plato observed long ago. One may go to Church or Synagogue just to hear the music or to be seen and to see others.
Similarly, one may watch a religious movie out of eusebiac, not hedonic, motive. Economics must stay silent here or reveal itself to be a braying ass.

Since religious rioting can be categorised as this sort of participation,

No it can't, unless there is a religion which says 'rioting is pleasing to the Lord. So is raping and looting. Go thou and commit mayhem.'
A Religion may ordain ethnic cleansing- but that must be done systematically and once and for all.

we would expect an increase in the rate of Indian growth to lead to fewer riots.

No we wouldn't. We'd expect more riots in areas with fuzzy appropriable control rights and weak Governance. Turf wars characterize boom towns with inadequate policing and fuzzy land titles.Where Governance is weak, contract enforcement is outsourced to local Dons.

Who is this 'we' Iyer speaks of? Are there really any economists who think as she does? Do they also believe their grannies, in between going to the Temple, spend their time rioting?

Religion may also be a way of ensuring income and happiness in spite of economic fluctuations—especially, as is the case in developing countries, in the absence of other risk-mitigating institutions.
[…]

A pooling equilibrium, based on 'cheap talk', offers less security than a 'separating equilibrium', based on a 'costly signal'. Religion based networks can evolve these 'costly signals'. However this has nothing to do with rioting. The theory of comparative advantage says you should hire professional rapists and cutthroats to manage that side of things. Marwaris were able to give a fitting reply to Shurawardy's 'Direct Action Day', not by knifing people themselves, but by paying professionals to do so on their behalf. This also meant they could stop the killing once it was clear Calcutta would go to India, not Pakistan. That was the point of the Shurawardy-Gandhi 'miracle in Calcutta'. The professional hoodlums renounced violence till such time as they were once again paid to perform it. A Bangladeshi author writing in the NYT says that Muslims who left West Bengal for East Pakistan did so for purely economic reasons. Hindus expelled from the East could not displace Muslims in the West as happened in East Punjab. That is why the population exchange was one-sided in the East.

In India, rioting is mainly, but not entirely, an urban phenomenon: only 18.1% of Hindu-Muslim riots in my data set took place in villages, with the remaining occurring in towns or cities.

Villagers are smart enough to run away once the first couple of corpses are discovered. Systematic ethnic cleansing does happen in rural areas, however, a superior alternative is the gradual immiserization and enslavement of the minority.

However, this effect could be interacting with the rent-seeking effects of rapid urban economic growth.

In other words, in the absence of good Governance, there is rent dissipation.

Furthermore, urban disturbances may be reported more faithfully, given the size of the country. In contrast to the Stark-Finke hypothesis, R Barro and R McCleary find an inverse urban-attendance relationship and attribute this to the presence of competing leisure activities in cities.

Barro and McCleary think the devout Catholic who may be cleaning their homes or offices can't attend Church not because she has 3 jobs but because of the few hours she has in the evening to doze off in front of the TV set. That's her 'competing leisure activity'.

Urban populations are more heterogeneous and thus established religious institutions have to make a real effort to establish contact with new arrivals and to cater to their needs. Where there is large scale immigration from other regions of the globe, it may take some time for appropriate institutions to be created. However, religious participation may have been previously happening in an informal manner. The statistics won't pick this up.

The literature on the economics of religion may also explain membership in right-wing religious organisations such as the RSS, which imposes strict prohibitions on its members. 

The RSS is not a religious organisation. That is why Amit Shah, a Jain, feels at home in it. Furthermore, it has a Muslim wing. It does prohibit casteist behavior on the part of its members. Some believe Hinduism condones the caste system and that the RSS's 'Hindutva' runs counter to 'Manuvadi' Religion.

Iannaccone and E Berman model this as a club good: the sect imposes sacrifices that may stigmatise members in the view of outsiders but that also eliminate free riders who partake of religious participation without appropriate commitment.

This is the wrong model. A club good has high excludability. Moreover its benefits are non-rivalrous, not dependent on intensity of engagement as represented by one's position within a hierarchy.

A Cult or Elitist Organisation can exclude 'low caste' people or people of the wrong class, color or gender.  A Religion can't do so without giving up all claim to universality. The RSS won't turn me away just because I'm fat, old, poor and have unorthodox religious views. However, I will get little benefit from membership because I don't give a damn about India or the poor or whatever. Thus I will never rise up within that organisation nor will my membership of it result in some tangible benefit to Society from which I could take vicarious satisfaction.

Thus sacrifice and stigma, by signaling commitment, may be a second-best solution to crowding externalities within the congregation.

Crowding externalities are costlessly dealt with by branching- the creation of new 'shakhas'. Iyer is using the wrong model. This is a 'separating equilibrium' on the basis of costly signals which have reputational effects. It is not a club good because there is no congestion point.

Glaeser’s “political economy of hatred” provides us with non-income causes of rioting.

The relevant paper shows that 'hate creating stories'- like Iyer's attempt to create hatred of the RSS- are a matter of supply and demand. In this case, we have a narrow class of academics and soi disant 'public intellectuals' who have been talking shite about the BJP for thirty years constituting both the demand and the supply for this type of logorrheic coprophagy.

He defines hatred as “the willingness of members of one group to pay harm to members of another group.”

Which is what academics like Iyer have been doing. A few years ago, a couple of Bengali Hindus wrote a paper suggesting that Hindus kill Muslims if they get richer. 

Though ostensibly irrational, hatred is modeled as a function of supply and demand in a political market. People hate because of feelings, whether justified or not, of injustice, or if they feel threatened.

Iyer type intellectuals do feel threatened by the BJP. Why? The Left-Liberals began a 'long march through the Institutions' to complete irrelevance, some fifty years ago. Now, they realize that Departments and Professorial Chairs they thought were their monopoly are slipping from their grasp. They consider this unjust.

This is reflected in other historical work as well: for example, Jaffrelot writes extensively about Indian Hindus as the majority with a minority complex.

Hindus have been ethnically cleansed but have not done this on any substantial or enduring scale. The caste system is what gives them this minority complex. Consider what happened when the French Governor of a South Indian town decided to level the Mosque and the Temple. The Muslims were united in opposing this. The Hindus showed no similar unity. Why? It was because the priests of the Temple were arrogant, grasping, bastards. Ananda Ranga Pillai said to them, 'you people are extortionate in your demands. Today you want us to protect your Temple from which you make a big profit. You claim it is our religious duty to do so. Tomorrow, you will demand we send you our wives and daughters. That too will be our supposed religious duty. Fend for yourselves or get your caste fellows to help you. We won't stand with you.'

The British, meanwhile, did not demolish either Temples or Mosques. Also they actually paid their bills. So they prevailed over the French. Hindus living in majority Muslim populations slit their own throats by supporting the Independence struggle. Others supported the Communist party which endorsed Partition and then got its throat cut in Pakistan.

According to Glaeser, the demand for hatred is reflected by the willingness of consumers to listen to hateful stories—which may or may not be true—supplied by politicians.

Or, in this case, imbecilic economists.

It is an increasing function of the psychological need for the consumer to hate.

Yup, our libtard academics are hopelessly addicted to scare stories about Fascists taking over everything.

For example, if the consumer’s group has just faced a loss, then he or she may have an innate interest in finding a scapegoat to hate. Hatred is a decreasing function of the benefits that a person in the majority group obtains from social or economic interaction with the minority, the value of which we can assume increases as an economy grows.

This should be modeled as focal solutions for coordination games giving rise to hedging on discoordination games and the creation of arbitrage opportunities. This is because pooling equilibriums can deteriorate if the focal point is congestible. Discoordination games provide a ratchet. Reduced Uncertainty has the same effect as Economic Growth.

The benefits are a function of the minority group’s size and the extent to which its members are integrated into society. Thus, religious conflict can be modeled as a function of the percentage of minorities in the population.

This model fails immediately because we can see that countries with very small Muslim minorities produce more terrorism than those with much much larger proportionate Muslim minorities. Religious conflict can be modeled as a function of Governance related disincentives to running amok.

Politicians supply stories of past crimes, which transform non-haters into haters,

Just as libtard academics endlessly recycle gory stories about Godhra not

to maximise the number of votes received

but the number of citations they get from other libtard academics.

Individuals in the majority group vote based on the potential benefits they will receive from proposed policies as well as their dislike of the minority. Individuals in the minority group vote based on the potential benefits and their hatred of the majority.

So, this is a simplistic model with little explanatory value.

Politicians supply stories of past crimes, which transform non-haters into haters, to maximise the number of votes received.

But, if they are rational, they should take votes away from the supposed 'criminals'. Apartheid South Africa did strip voting rights off some coloured people in 1951.

This is a Just So story which presumes people are irrational. It does not correspond to anything observable. Why is Iyer propounding it? The answer is she wants to turn imaginary hate crimes into real hate crimes by saying 'well, look Modi was re-elected. This proves he must be guilty of what we said he was guilty off. How else can we explain this low caste man- who didn't even attend Harvard, let alone Cambridge- beating Rahul not once but twice?'

Politicians’ expenditure on hatred is constrained by the level of funds available to campaigning parties, the political organisation of minorities, and constitutional statutes limiting abuse of minorities.

Hatred can be spread by telling stupid lies- as Iyer's ilk has been doing for decades. What constrains it is not the amount of money Universities have to push this tripe but the stupidity of the liars involved.

Constitutional statues limiting the abuse of minorities can be overturned or ignored. They are not a constraint at all.

The supply of hatred is also determined by the initial level of hatred in society and the intergroup impact of politicians’ policies.

Nonsense! Experience shows that the supply of hatred is linked to exogenous factors- like terrorists crashing planes into skyscrapers. Why assume hatred is endogenous? I may want to suppress you, but that does not necessarily mean I hate you. Indeed, I may be keen to kiss you and have sexual intercourse with you.

Thus a pro-redistribution candidate is likely to benefit minorities the most if they are poorer, and the response of the opposition may be to create hatred of them.

Experience shows that pro-redistribution candidates hurt the poorest the most. That's why people stopped voting for them.

Glaeser’s model suggests that in equilibrium, the level of hatred increases with intergroup economic differences, time spent listening to messages of hatred, the level of funds of the right-wing candidate, the benefits from interactions expropriated by the majority group, and the voter’s interest in the subsidy received from hating.

This is not a trembling hand equilibrium. A small perturbation in any of the determining factor would lead to a runaway process. Thus nobody with Rational Expectations could hold this to be an equilibrium. Since it is not expected to be an equilibrium, it can't be any such thing. There is ex post and ex ante mismatch.

Intragroup economic differences are greater than intergroup differences because babies have less money than Daddies. The very elderly are likely to have lower disposable income than workers in their prime. Elasticity of supply differs within groups because of differences in genetic and other endowment. This means that intergroup differences will always be less than intragroup differences even within the same cohort.

Iyer believes people spend time listening to messages of hatred. Who listens to her? Nobody- save to dismiss her as a cretin or to suborn her work for a similarly meretricious purpose.

There is no 'subsidy received from hating'. This woman is utterly mad. 

Hatred falls with the number of interactions not carried out specifically with the members of one’s group,

Which is why beat cops love muggers and rapists and other such scum so much. Libtards in their ivory towers, who never interact with such sociopaths, want to hang every last one of them- so intense is their hatred.

the benefits from interactions with minorities, and the funds available to the left-wing candidate. Hatred displays increasing returns and, once started, is costly to curb.

So, it is a run-away process. The steady state involves extinction of the alterity unless there is a co-evolved process. But, if co-evolution occurs, the thing may be very cheap to curb. Consider what happened when the Caliphate was on the rise. It made big territorial & financial gains. Some idiotic professors spoke of its inevitable triumph because of its supposedly superior 'anti-fragility'. Then everybody bombed the shit out of it.

The size of minorities has an ambiguous effect: if they are large, it is costly for both politicians and voters to hate; but large minorities may increase the majority voter’s innate interest in the benefits of hating.

Whites were a minority in South Africa in 1951 when they stripped coloured people of the right to vote. Power matters. Hatred may gain enough power to kill or enslave a much larger population. But it won't bother with constitutional or democratic window dressing.

Ultimately, incentives to both voters and politicians must be altered to change the level of hatred in society.

By whom? Cretins like Iyer? Who will give them the power to do this mechanism design? Who will listen to them if they keep telling stupid lies?

Glaeser concludes that economic and social integration and statutes preventing the political use of minorities as scapegoats help fight hatred.

Statutes can be ignored or overturned. Economic integration occurs if there is an economic motive for it. This can't be created by magic by stupid Professors. Markets, however, can achieve this provided it is genuinely economic to do so. Since non-academics are better at actual economising, it follows that such academics should continue to be wholly disintermediated from the process. On the other hand, we do need to continually remind them not to sexually harass their students and refrain from filling their hands with their own feces so as to fling it about at Departmental Meetings. If necessary, rules regarding tenure should be changed to curb this type of nuisance.

Concomitant with Glaeser’s analysis, secularism has been associated with the formerly socialist Congress Party.

Congress was propped up in 2004 by the Communist parties who pretended this was the 1938 'Popular Front' strategy required to combat the rise of a supposedly Nazi like BJP. The result of this stupidity on the part of the Left was its slow suicide.

For example, former Congress prime minister Manmohan Singh once commented that “Muslims must have the first claim on resources.”

Which Muslims believed- NOT!

The size of the Muslim minority (15% of the population) is not insignificant, but it implies that the BJP need not court Muslim voters to gain electoral success—although the empirical relationship between the size of the minority and rioting that we observe is interesting.

No it isn't. The thing is an artifact of your own stupidity and prejudice.

Thus, microeconomic models study the determinants of religiosity, as well as the dynamics of the market for religion.

But such models fail utterly. Exogenous factors matter. Barbarians sacking Rome increased religiosity. The Medici Popes increasing the Vatican's temporal power reduced it.

Low wage rates and unemployment due to slow growth, or inequality and urbanisation, are potential factors in the decision to riot.

The only potential factor in the decision to riot has to do with one's chance of doing so without getting shot, beaten to death or sent to prison.

The causality here runs from income to religious activity, a source of simultaneity in our examination of the effect of religious violence on growth.

No such causality obtains. High wages and tight employment markets can yield high religiosity as people abstain from drugs because they wish to live long lives and then go to Heaven. Low wages and  high unemployment may cause many people to despair and take drugs and get involved in prostitution and petty crime and other such demoralizing activities. They may become anti-clerical and take pride in attacking Churches and raping nuns and so forth.

Non-income determinants of rioting include the size of the minority and the prominence of political parties.

Says Iyer who lives in green and pleasant England. How does she explain the hoodie riots? Unemployment? It was low in the cohort affected. Real wages were so high, immigrants from France were attracted. Which minority was targeted or doing the targeting? The thing started when a Black gangster was shot. But the hoodies were of all colors. Religious people- whether Muslim or Sikh or Christian- did not take part. Why? Rioting is against Scripture. It is illegal. It is a sin. Writing rubbish under the pretense of doing economics is not illegal. But, it isn't a good thing either. Still, as an Iyer myself, I'm glad an Iyer is doing it instead of one of those damn Iyengars. I urge Sriya to go beat up Amia Srinivasan. Show that toffee nosed Vaishnavite that philosophers don't have the monopoly on cretinism. I would do the job myself- but I was very severely injured by a 4 year Iyengar girl whom I attacked because of her rebuttal of my argument re. the validity of the Mochizuki proof of the abc conjecture. Since then I have embraced Ahimsa and stopped pretending I know from Math. Sriya, however, is made of sterner stuff. This book of hers represents a great step forward for the Iyer community. On the basis of its imbecility we should be immediately granted not just Educationally Backward Caste status but a special quota on account of our utter mental retardation.