Arun Maira had a very successful private sector career before Manmohan inducted him into the Planning Commission. He writes in the Indian Express-
Aspiring to become a world-class liberal arts university, Ashoka University has landed in a controversy.
Because it made the mistake of hiring a flaky guy who needed his ego constantly massaged. Ashoka should have retaliated strongly against Mehta & Subramanian- accusing them of abandoning their students so as to seek greener pastures- and dragging them into Court if necessary.
Beyond intrigues about whether political powers had pressured the university’s donors, directly or indirectly, to persuade an eminent public intellectual to resign from his role in the university, there are much broader, civilisational questions.
No there aren't. Either Mehta is lying or people like Gurcharan Das are lying. Someone has behaved in an uncivilized manner. The question is- who?
One is, what is an education in liberal arts, and why do we need more of it in the 21st century?
A liberal arts education involves the study of history, literature, writing, philosophy, sociology, psychology, creative arts etc. It has a high income elasticity of demand because as people get richer they want to appear more cultured- or actually be more cultured and thus better able to appreciate 'the finer things in life'.
As people get richer during the course of this century, they will want more of this type of education- provided Colleges actually provide it rather than just concentrate on infecting students with a stupid type of 'wokeness'.
Another is, how do we, and how should we, determine what is “world-class”?
By looking at what is best in the world. You are 'world class' if you are taking market share from the globally dominant enterprises in your line of business.
Alongside are questions about the governance of institutions, as well as clashes between principles of capitalism and democracy.
These questions are resolved by the Law.
These questions have become urgent to create a better world in the 21st century.
No they haven't. They don't matter in the slightest.
They also need more attention while implementing the Indian government’s programme to create world-class educational institutions, and the National Education and National Science, Technology, and Innovation policies.
No. Bullshitting won't help anyone. Actually doing the thing is all that matters. But that means utilizing existing resources more efficiently rather than talking bollocks incessantly.
European enlightenment laid the tracks for Western scientific advances from the 17th century.
No it didn't. The Scientific Revolution preceded the spread of Enlightenment ideas. But first came a rise in productivity and increased trade based on the principle of comparative advantage.
Science propelled the industrialisation of European countries and gave them tools for military power.
The need for military power fueled Scientific advances. The decline of the Church correlated with its relative military incapacity. Where the Church did not decline there was no Enlightenment, no Economic growth, and no Scientific Revolution.
European gunboats forcibly opened up markets and resources for their industries in other countries.
Only if those countries forcibly prevented trade on the basis of absolute and comparative advantage.
An epistemic colonisation accompanied the economic and political colonisation.
Nonsense! You had to pay good money to get a Western education. Maira must have noticed that many more people in India can now speak English. This is because, as the country got richer, they could afford to buy a Western type of education.
Western ways of thinking were considered superior for human advancement.
They were superior. Why pretend otherwise? Even Gandhi gave up on Ayurveda- he said it made him too ill- and permitted Western Medicine to save his life.
Spiritual quests in religions and philosophies, eastern as well as western, were pushed aside in favour of science.
Once Science has made your life comfortable, you are welcome to become a Zen Master or Voodoo Priest.
The British scientist C P Snow noted in 1959, in The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, that the intellectual life of Western society was split into two cultures — the sciences and the humanities.
But the humanities shat the bed.
He said this was a major hindrance to solving the world’s problems and lamented that there was not enough science. He wrote: “The great edifice of modern physics goes up, and yet the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors have”.
That changed. Even the ancient Public Schools downgraded Latin and Greek in favor of Physics and Mathematics.
Along with science, other ideologies also began to change the course of human progress in the latter half of the 20th century. The belief that humans are incapable of governing a collective enterprise — Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons — infected economics.
Humans can govern a collective enterprise with clear lines of command and effective carrots and sticks to regulate behavior.
Economics has always known that where an opportunity cost obtains, a good should not be free. Hardin was an ecologist. Is Maira saying that Ecological Science is an ideology of a pernicious type? This is plausible. The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies him as a White Nationalist.
With this, “privatisation”, the conversion of public resources into private properties became an ideology too.
If a 'public resource', which is scarce, can be appropriated by a private party, then it has been 'privatized' on a 'first come first served' basis. However a criminal gang is likely to intervene so as to collect rents.
The earth’s land, forest, and water resources were privatised to improve the productivity of their use and the speed of their exploitation.
What was the alternative? Either the thing was scarce, in which case some party would appropriate it without paying for it, or else it wasn't scarce and thus there was no point referring to it as a public resource. It was simply a free good.
Even the ownership of knowledge was privatised,
Knowledge is private. Does this cretin really think that if you know something then everybody else knows it too through telepathy? It is a different matter that laws exist so that those with knowledge can supply it to others for a consideration.
and, with the expansion of intellectual property regimes (IPR), intellectual monopolies have grown, owned mostly by private corporations in the West, even when the knowledge was created largely with public money.
The American economy benefited greatly when Knowledge previously owned by the Government was put back into the hands of its producers. Tax revenue from that private use of knowledge more than repaid the initial investment.
The inequities in the modern intellectual property regimen are becoming tragically visible in the vaccine wars of 2021.
No they aren't. There would be no vaccines if there hadn't been a profit incentive to create them. The big problem is with delivery.
Those who own, call the shots, and those who pay, come first. The rest must wait for charity.
Actually, enlightened self-interest causes the rich to wish to see the vaccine as widely distributed as possible. This is because of the 'externality' associated with contagious diseases which can continue to mutate into deadlier forms unless everybody is vaccinated.
Science supplanted the humanities in 20th century education.
Because Science got better. The Humanities got worse.
Further, science was overtaken by technology.
No. Science created technology.
Technologists use science to produce tangible and marketable results.
How naughty of them! They should be producing intangible, spiritual, results.
They are the new “wealth creators” in economies.
They were also the old wealth creators in economies.
Moreover, when wealth has become the measure of the worthiness of individuals and institutions, it is inevitable that the examples and ideas of the wealthy are considered as “world class”.
Nonsense! Nobody thinks Bill Gates is a world class strip-tease artist.
Money speaks.
The expression is 'Money talks, Bullshit walks'. What Maira is indulging in is senile, ignorant, bullshit.
Business enterprises have a narrow purpose which is to create profits and wealth for their owners by using resources efficiently.
Worthwhile organizations have a narrow purpose- which is to create more Social Benefit than Social Cost.
This ideology was propagated by the same Chicago School that shaped the “anti-socialist” and “anti-government” policies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan (which had broadened into the Washington Consensus by the end of the millennium).
As opposed to the Delhi School which propagated poverty and more and more bullshit of a useless type. Thatcher and Reagan were successful. Various cretins named Gandhi were not. Thankfully bullets and bombs proved effective against them.
In this ideology, ethical questions about the impacts of businesses and technologies (and indeed economic growth) on society and the environment are not important.
Ethical questions are never important. One can always turn the tables on the one who asks them by saying 'it is unethical of you to talk of ethics when trillions of innocent people are being forced to commit suttee by evil Corporates.'
They are “externalities” that do not fit into the business and economic calculus.
Yes they do. It pays to internalize externalities- that is why Companies exist. Has this cretin never heard of Coase?
Questions about the purpose of human existence, and the purposes of the sciences and institutions humans create, belong to religion and philosophy which were shoved out of the education of citizens.
Nonsense! You can study both in School or out of School.
Designs of economic institutions have caused financial wealth to be sucked upwards faster.
Mechanism Design is irrelevant if the Design is incentive incompatible.
Thomas Piketty and others have recorded how much wealth inequalities have increased, consequently, in the last 50 years. Even during 2020, when real economies were locked down by the pandemic, stock markets soared, and the wealth of the rich increased by over $3 trillion, while over 500 million people fell into poverty.
So what? The return on Wealth fell. The suggestio falsi here is that because Wealth increased for some, Income for others fell. The truth is obvious. Lockdown meant employment fell. Paucity of investment opportunities meant the marginal efficiency of capital fell or became negative. There was a 'flight to quality'. This benefited some Companies and hedge funds which appeared better placed to rise thanks to a 'shake out'.
Some of the wealth generated during these go-go years of financial capitalisation was invested in enterprises producing “public” goods such as education and health.
These are, at best, 'club goods', not 'public goods' because they are rival and excludable.
These made even more wealth for investors. And some of it has trickled back in philanthropy. However, whenever wealth is invested, or donated, by people who have made it in the business and financial sectors, their ideas about how enterprises should be run come into their social ventures too.
If wealth is stolen or confiscated then that wealth is used in ways which reflect the ideas of the thieves or confiscators.
The principle of good governance in a capitalist enterprise is that one dollar invested gives one vote.
There is no such principle. This guy used to work for the Tatas. Did he really not know that control can be retained by minority shareholders? The concept of 'pyramiding' is taught to 16 year old students of Econ or Business Studies.
Whereas in a democratic enterprise, everyone who is part of the enterprise has an equal vote, whether they are billionaires or paupers.
No enterprises of this type exist anywhere.
This creates problems when financial donors’ concepts of value differ from democratic values.
If donors exist then there is no 'democratic enterprise' whatsoever. There is merely a charity of a certain type.
Reforms are imperative for institutions of business and public services, even in the West from which the East has been receiving “best practices” so far.
Reforms are imperative in the cognitive functioning of shitheads who write Opinion pieces for the Indian Express. They seem to be competing with each other for the title of biggest cretin on the planet.
Public institutions of national and international governance also need reform to make economic growth more environmentally sustainable, and to “leave no one behind” — the UN aspiration for the 21st century.
Pedophilia must be reformed till it leaves little boys' behinds alone. Why isn't that an UN aspiration for the 21st century?
Why stop there? Let us demand fundamental reforms in the minds of naughty people.
The old “world class” needs reforms.
No it does not. It needs more competition.
India and the world must invent new forms of world-class institutions.
This can be done in an environmentally sustainable manner by telling lies. Consider the Institute of Socio-Proctology which I have set up in Bastar. It boasts a ten trillion dollar Large Hadron Collider hooked up to a Quantum Computer. All students, regardless of gender or caste, are paid 40 billion dollars to attend. They receive brain implants such that their knowledge base and cognitive abilities exceed that of all the geniuses around the globe put together.
Imaginary world-class institutions must be granted equality with real ones. Come to think of it Dr. Mamta Bannerjee has a PhD from an imaginary University. She has shown us the way forward.
All the actors involved in the Ashoka tragedy are good people with good intentions.
No. Either Mehta lied or someone else lied. Good people don't tell lies.
They are playing their roles within a larger script not of their making.
Very true! Whole world is Maya- illusory. There is a Celestial Script-writer. We are merely puppets.
More dialogues are required, with open minds, within and outside educational institutions, where the clear stream of reason is not lost in the dreary desert sand of intellectual ideologies. And debates are not about “who did it”, but “why is it so”.
What is the point of holding a dialogue with an utter cretin like Maira? He has nothing substantive to say.
Why is Indian Higher Education not world class? Because India is poor. It can get rich by pushing its brightest kids into high value-adding fields. It should open up competition in Education and Skills Training and abolish the requirement for sheepskins to enter any profession- save Medicine.
India should not fund Humanities or Liberal Arts or other worthless shite. It should concentrate resources on high r.o.i Skills training. India has a comparative and absolute advantage in Medical Colleges. Build lots more and let them compete with each other. The thing will pay for itself as overseas students come flocking in and Medical tourism rises yet more steeply. It is shameful that India sends so many Medical students to China. Stupid cunts like Maira wasted their time in the Planning Commission. India is a shithole because its public intellectuals- whether from the private sector, like Maira, or state subsidized Lefties- have shit inside their brain. They prefer to virtue signal rather than do anything virtuous.
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