Fareed Zakaria on Modi

Zakaria comes from an important Congress political family. He was a student of Huntington- indeed he commissioned the famous 'Clash of Civilizations' article from Huntington for 'Foreign Affairs' of which he became the editor at the very young age of 28. Had he remained in Academia, he would, no doubt, be an Ivy League Professor. 

Still, even without a berth in Academia, such was Zakaria's brilliance that, some 20 years ago, people spoke of him as a future Secretary of State- i.e. the Kissinger of the Twenty First Century. Sadly, America thought it could export democracy and 'the new world order' by slaughtering Muslims in remote deserts and mountains. Zakaria did well to keep out of that shit-show.

Turning to India, Zakaria says some odd things- e.g. to Tyler Cowan

If you’re speaking one of the languages (Hindi or Urdu), there’s a way to alternate between both, which a lot of Indian politicians used to do as a way of signaling a broad embrace of both the Hindu and the Muslim communities.

Zakaria did not notice that under Nehru, millions of Muslims were slaughtered or had to leave India. The last thing on their minds was whether they were being addressed in Hindi or Urdu.

 Moreover, Muslim League Mullahs, when addressing the common folk, had to use both the Islamic origin word as well as the ordinary Indic word in their discourse. Thus they might say 'munafiqat yani pakhand' or even 'shab yani raath'. Muhammad Ali Jinnah himself spoke very good Kutchi but had not received much instruction in Farsi and Urdu. This did not matter in the slightest. People understood he wanted Muslims to have a separate state even if it meant that 20 million Muslims in the Hindu majority areas were abandoned to a grisly fate.

Nehru, India’s first prime minister, used to often do that. He would say, “I am delighted to be coming here to your home.” He’d repeat the word home, first in Urdu, then in Hindi, so that in effect, both constituencies were covered.

Home is 'ghar' in both Hindi and Urdu. Nehru didn't say 'nivas'. He'd have looked a fool.  

Modi, by contrast, India’s current prime minister, is a great Hindu nationalist. He takes pains almost never to use an Urdu word when he speaks.

Zakaria, who has interviewed Modi on TV and heard him speak Hindi, clearly thinks that, as a Yalie 'native informant', Whitey will take him at his word, while his own brown brethren don't matter at all.

The fact is Modi  mixes Urdu and English just like everybody else though, as a politician, he does have a perfect command of bureaucratic Hindi. But so do I. So does anyone who ever prepared for the IAS exams. In any case, once he became CM or PM he'd have had good speech writers. Being a good orator, he probably polishes these up by replacing recondite words with the 'mot juste' which, itself, has to do with popular trends. 

He speaks in a kind of highly Sanskritized Hindi that most Indians actually find hard to understand because the everyday language, Bollywood Hindi, is a mixture of Hindi words and Urdu words, so there are Persian and Sanskrit origins.

Modi gained national attention as a spokesperson for the BJP of which he had become a national general secretary in 1998-99. He used the same Urdu terms e.g. 'aham mudda' as everybody else and peppered his discourse with English phrases- e.g. howm instead of 'vote to defeat', there would be 'vote to punish', those who had brought down Vajpayee's government in 1999. 

But for Modi and for people of his ilk in the BJP — his party — it’s very important to “cleanse the language Hindi from foreign influences.” That is why they will speak a very Sanskritized Hindi.

Nonsense! Brahmins like Vajpayee or Murli Manohar may have been expected to do so. But they too understood the need to appeal to the youth. The plain fact is, it was under Nehru that 'Hindization' on the basis of Sanskrit was pushed forward. This was because of a promise that had been made at the time when the Constitution was being drafted that Hindi would be made the national language by 1965. The problem was that nobody knew what was correct Hindi. The joke was that the thing the Government had concocted- and this was Nehru's government, nobody else's- was incomprehensible. Thus when the Radio announcer said 'now listen to the news in Hindi', what actually happened was you heard some Hindi in the news. But the same thing was happening in Pakistan. Words of Arabic and Persian origin were replacing those of indigenous origin. I may mention, in Tamil Nadu, Tamil too was being 'purified'. So what? By the Eighties, nobody gave a toss for those linguistic shibboleths.  

When did Modi begin his rise as a popular icon? I think an interview he gave in December 1998 to Zee TV was the turning point. The big question then was whether the RSS was interfering with the BJP. Were they trying to pull down Vajpayee? Were they adamant on the imposition of a Hindutva agenda even if this meant that the BJP could not lead a coalition? What about losses in Haryana and Delhi? Were they not self-inflicted wounds? 

The truth was that the RSS had its doubts about Vajpayee. They feared that a BJP government would become just as corrupt and complacent as a Congress administration. Could Modi- a hard-core RSS worker from a very modest background- dispel the doubts of the TV audience? Could he withstand a grilling by the urbane and very well-spoken TV anchor? The answer was yes. Modi spoke sensibly with a touch of humour. He said Hindutva 'is an article of faith'- he used that English phrase. Faith can't be imposed. Hindus know this is the teaching of all of their own sects. One can pray to God for the gift of Faith. One can't hire a guy to beat it into you. The RSS wants to revitalize and raise up every branch of national life. But, in politics, this can only be done by establishing 'credibility' through 'transparency' and improving 'coordination'. Modi sometimes supplies the Hindi equivalent of the English words he is using, but sometimes he does not bother to do so. What matters is that he has got his point across. Governance can't be on the basis of slogans or some magical ideology. It is a practical, wholly pragmatic, enterprise. 

Modi tackles the allegation that the BJP was trying to impose Hindu worship by pointing out that a previous PM- I.K Gujral- had the same Hindu prayer at a function. No one batted an eyelid then. It was the height of 'hypocrisy' to raise the matter now so as to pander to vote-bank politics. 

 Modi was able to win over the audience because he could admit that the BJP had made mistakes. It was a case of 'self-out' in Delhi. This raised a laugh. Modi admitted there had been coordination failures. In Haryana, the mood of the people had not been adequately prepared for the idea of prohibition. Modi explains that all parties need to re-establish credibility and improve coordination. True, he uses English words- and this can be a magical substitute for thinking- but he is choosing to fully answer the question as stated. He is candid. He can be quite humorous but one can see he is a serious man. But, he knows the existential threats facing the country can only be overcome by everybody working together. There is no 'top-down' solution. That is why he is speaking in a natural, not an oracular or obscurantist, manner. He is not repeating slogans. He is not ducking questions. He is saying 'I'm an RSS man. We want to revitalize every area of National life. But, Politics must be transparent (he adds the shuddh Hindi word for this) it must be focused on governance which is not a matter of Faith, it is a matter of learning to face new circumstances. In other words, the RSS did not think it had some magical remedy for what ailed India. It understood that governance was the same type of work as is done by any commercial enterprise. The public, too, Modi said, understands this. A true article of faith is not a playing card you can throw down to win the electoral jackpot. What was required was hard work, willingness to learn and adapt, and coordination and the maintenance of credibility through transparent processes. Modi himself, by speaking sensibly and admitting the shortcomings of his party, was contributing to this. 

It is odd that Indian intellectuals decided, against all the evidence, that Modi was a semi-literate Hitler who shouted slogans in shuddh Hindi. Zakaria says Modi is both the 'outsider' and the 'insider'. This is not true as far as Delhi is concerned. People who watched the Zee TV interview understood that Modi, as a general secretary of the ruling party, was an insider. Moreover, he showed he could disagree with senior people like Sushma Swaraj. True, he might be dropped by the High Command or sent back to his own Home State (which is what happened in 2001) but he was an accomplished professional and could choose the degree to which he wanted to be inside or outside the circles of power in Delhi. 

Zakaria repeats the canard that Modi is like Orban or Erdogan. What he does not get that is Modi rose in a professional, cadre based, political party. He is like Clinton- a successful Governor who became a successful President. He isn't like Trump or Orban or Erdogan who were ab ovo sui generis politicians or have become so. Ask the question, what happens if Modi drops dead? The answer is Shah takes over though they may pick a different figure going into a General Election. There are plenty of people of all sorts who have risen from the ranks of the RSS pracharak. Some are senior lawyers or engineers or educationists etc. I have no idea whom they will bring forward but I do know that, they will drop the fellow like a hot potato if he doesn't click with the voters. That is where Dynastic parties fall down. 

Zakaria is unusual in that he is a cheerleader for India- more particularly an India that goes much further down the path of reform. What he doesn't get is that Modi's 'viksit bharat sankalp yatra' is meant to provide a Social minimum or safety net such that factor mobility can improve, female participation can rise, and thus India can tackle existential environmental and other threats without losing its ethos as a Democracy under the Rule of Law. But, for transparent politics, you have to get rid of Dynasticism. For transparent Capital markets, you have to tackle the problem of the Joint Family enterprise where there is great opacity which inevitably give rise to succession battles which can sink the entire conglomerate. 

Zakaria does not mention India's true 'man of Destiny'- Rahul Gandhi- but for whose reluctance to take the job which got his granny and daddy shot- Modi would never have been the PM candidate in 2014. What type of language does Rahul speak? In Hindi, he is staccato when he isn't just shrill. In English, he is vacuous. In both, he is unelectable. That is why only the rustics of Wayanad- who understand neither English nor Hindi- will vote for him. Unless, they too are tired of his antics and switch to voting for Annie Raja, the wife of the Communist Party General Secretary. 

Fareed's latest book 'Age of Revolutions' warns that 'liberalism’s great strength has been freeing people from arbitrary constraints

This is nonsense. Either productivity was rising, which meant 'arbitrary constraints' were already being evaded or eroded, or else liberalism was shit. Consider the overthrow of the Portuguese monarchy in 1910. You had 'Liberal', anti-clerical, Republican administrations for 16 years. There were eight presidents and 45 ministries during that period. But productivity didn't rise. None shed a tear when those useless shitheads were kicked out by the Army. An economist, Salazar, was installed but productivity didn't rise much. It was only after another Revolution in the Seventies that Portugal could securely lodge itself on the path to affluence. 

—but its great weakness has been leaving individuals isolated, to figure out for themselves what makes for a good life. 

Liberalism says what makes for a good life is your rising in productivity and thus opulence. You can't be generous- i.e. liberal- if you are as poor as shit. True, if a bunch of Liberals take over a Malthusian shithole, there will be no 'Tardean mimetic effect' whereby ordinary people have a path to rise into opulence and political correctness by getting richer through higher productivity. But, in this case, sooner or later, either the Army or a peasant jacquerie will kick out those Liberals, or else slit their throats.  

Still, Zakaria is right. A true Liberal should be constantly interfering with people rather than letting them figure out for themselves whether they want some bien pensant Yalie to instruct them in the splendours of sodomy or the glories of gender reassignment surgery. 

This void – the hole in the heart – can all too easily be filled by tribalism, populism, and identity politics.

Only in the sense that the void in your rectum- the asshole in your buttocks- can all to easily be filled with various root vegetables and common household objects. A true Liberal would interfere actively in the lives of the population to prevent them shoving the vacuum cleaner up their arse or else filling their hearts with tribalism.  

Today’s revolutions in technology and culture can even leave people so adrift that they turn against modernity itself.

I live in a part of London where lots of the artists and intellectuals 'turned against modernity itself'. There was William Morris, there were the Pre-Raphaelites, there was G.K Chesterton, there was Yeats- indeed, both M.K Gandhi and Shri Aurobindo once lived down the road from me. So what? We don't care if Liberals ponce around in khadi dhotis or Morris's handloom garments or pretend they are medieval knights and speak to each other in Wardour Street English. All that matters is productivity. Is it rising? If so, well and good. Otherwise there will be tears before bedtime. 

Revolutions don't greatly matter. Wars- total Wars- do. Why? Failure to raise productivity directly gives rise to an existential threat. Stop doing stupid shit. Stop talking bollocks. Engage in Tardean mimetics- i.e. look around and see who has highest productivity in a particular sector and try to imitate them. If you can't, try to find some remunerative activity you have a comparative advantage in and double down on it. Don't listen to guys with PhDs in useless shite. 

Consider the following excerpt from Zakaria's vacuous tome- 

A Multitude of Revolutions

The comedian Robin Williams sometimes talked about politics in his stand-up routines. He would begin by reminding people of the origins of the word. "Politics," he would explain, comes from " 'Poli,' a Latin word meaning many, and 'tics' meaning bloodsucking creatures." He always got a big laugh.

Even in the time of Aristophanes, it was common knowledge that some demagogues, in the pay of tax-farmers, were dangerous parasites of this sort. Thus the guy who stands up in the Agora and makes an impassioned speech about how we have to conquer such and such island because its people are in league with the Persians, may be in the pay of the guy who hopes to get the contract for disposing of the slaves we will gain. Slaves and metics were important because productivity was important. But if you grow wealthy you also have to worry about being invaded. Public policy involved trade-offs between security and opulence. Moreover, where there was a particular 'Pareto improvement' there was still the question as to who would capture those gains. Thus Political Economy has always been about productivity. Without it, you lose any type of freedom unless you are willing to live like the Scythians.  

In fact, alas, the word derives from ancient Greek, from polites, which means citizen and itself comes from polis, meaning city or community.

This was irrelevant. There already were ideas about 'Nations' and 'tribes'. Particular cities may have originally been settled by different tribes or else such tribal identities were subsequently imposed. What mattered was the trade-off between productivity and security.  

Aristotle's Politics, written in the fourth century BC, is a book about the ways to govern communities, and it discusses all the elements of politics that we would find familiar today—the nature of power, types of political systems, causes of revolutions, and so on.

Aristotle had shit for brains. His student, Alexander, was doing the opposite of everything he suggested. 'Homonoia'- i.e. universal norms and laws- is cool if the Stationary Bandit has economies of scope and scale and can become a 'natural' monopolist of coercive power. This is what the US thought it had after Yeltsin got drunk and shat the bed. But, the West frittered away its Hegemonic power by wasting a lot of money killing Muslims in far off places. The problem here is that Muslims believe in God. Moreover, their God will grant them victory eventually. Since Muslims are smart and not continually drunk, the sensible thing is not to piss them off. Why not just transact business with them in a polite manner?  That's what the Chinese do. 

Politics is one of those rare human enterprises that hasn't changed that much over the millennia.

No. It has changed greatly because technology, and thus productivity, has changed greatly. Zakaria is a cretin. He thinks America didn't have a big Army because the Federal Government could not raise money for it. He forgets that the first modern 'total' war was the Civil War. If America didn't have a big army after that, it was because it was so fucking powerful nobody messed with it. Napoleon III's foray into Mexico collapsed of its own accord. At a later point, the Germans and Japs were stupid enough to think they could fuck with America. America actually grew richer swatting them down like flies. But it was raising productivity in all fields, including the field of military conquest (nuclear bombs are labour saving devices) and paying for it through taxation till the Vietnam war hotted up. After that, as Obama said, American foreign policy consisted of doing stupid shit. Still, at least Reagan had the sense to run away from shit-shows like Lebanon. Gorby had become aware of the productivity gap. He was such a fool that he thought the solution was to relinquish Party control of the economy without realizing this would immediately precipitate a 'scissors crisis'- i.e. different sectors would lose the incentive to supply each other unless existing 'shadow prices' equalled or exceeded 'spot prices'. Mathematical economists helped make this clear to the nomenklatura. Kantorovich, hilariously, thought he had found the correct theory of value. He hadn't. He had concentrated the minds of apparatchiks on the fact that the spot market price for Soviet oil was much higher than what it was getting for it from places like Cuba or North Korea. Fuck Communism. Let's all just get very rich and buy super-yachts in the same way the Arab Sheikhs do. 

Its outward forms have shifted, but its core concern remains the same: the struggle for power and what to do with it.

People may struggle for power within their own family or place of work. Political Economy is about raising productivity without endangering internal or external security. Zakaria wasted his time studying stupid shit.  

In 64 BC, Rome's greatest orator, Cicero,

who was Epicurean in Economics and Stoic in Jurisprudence. He understood money. Sadly, he was a bit of a blathershite.  

ran for the office of consul. His younger brother decided to write for him a guide of sorts to winning elections, a set of practical lessons for his sometimes too idealistic sibling.

Nonsense! That brother was considered a bit cracked in the head and prone to the use of cruel and unusual punishments. The 'Commentariolum' may have been written later by some pedagogue as a rhetorical exercise. Cicero and his brother were well educated but the family was clearly on the make. Still, a lawyer may well want to appear idealistic or moral or religious or as possessing good taste. But, if he and his family were worth killing, it is clear that they were part of the power-games of the period. 

Among his suggestions: promise everything to everyone, always be seen in public surrounded by your most passionate supporters, and remind voters of your opponents' sex scandals. More than two thousand years later, political consultants charge hefty fees to dispense the same advice.

This is like saying Doctors charge hefty fees for saying 'you should improve your health'. The truth is we pay for prescriptions only from those with superior domain-expertise or scientific knowledge. 

Despite these constants, in recent centuries, politics has taken on a particular ideological shape that would have been alien to those living in the ancient or medieval world.

Not really. All we can say is that at a certain point, political economy became philosophy while, at some other point, it became theology after which it could become ideology. Yet there were underlying continuities.  

Modern politics around the world has been characterized as a contest between the Left and the Right.

By guys like Zakaria- sure. But we didn't say 'Blair is to the Left of Major' and we don't say 'Starmer is to the Left of Sunak'. We said Blair can be an effective PM as we now say 'Starmer might be able to defeat his enemies in his own party. Sunak is bound to get knifed in the back by a colleague who in turn will soon be knifed in the back by his closest supporter'.  

The simple demarcation of Left and Right has traditionally said a lot about where someone stands, whether in Brazil, the United States, Germany, or India: on the left, a stronger state with more economic regulation and redistribution;

the left is associated with weaker states with more corruption. There can only be redistribution from immobile factors- but that tends to be the elderly or the stupid.  

on the right, a freer market with less governmental intervention.

Not necessarily. If less intervention is needed for productivity gains without which the state will collapse, a sensible politician will take that road no matter what ideological bollocks he spouts.  

This left-right divide had long dominated the political landscape of the world,

In England, my generation considered it meaningless. Why? In the Seventies, the academic Left doubled down on Prices and Incomes Policy, even though Callaghan & Healey knew it didn't work. But, in the US, it was Nixon who had introduced that policy. He truly was the last Keynesian. What Zakaria may not know is that the traditional Right was committed to the Bretton Woods straitjacket and embraced Exchange Controls and so forth whereas the upstart 'Hayekian' neo-Liberals were ready to abandon the traditional 'Corporatist' interest groups to their fate. In the Tory party, the 'Old Etonians' were wets who were wary of 'Big Bang' and deregulation while the 'Old Estonians'- i.e. Jews who remained such no matter where they went to School- were for Thatcher, Tebbit and 'Dagenham man'. Harold McMillan was the voice of the traditional Tory party denouncing the selling of the family silver- i.e. Privatization. 

defining elections, public debates, and policies, even provoking violence and revolution. But these days, this fundamental ideological division has broken down.

It broke down long ago. Essentially, the upper working class in OECD countries was voting against 'redistribution' at the end of the Sixties. By the end of the Seventies, they had turned against the Teamsters and 'Corporate Welfare'- i.e. paying big Companies to featherbed Unionized workers. 

Consider Donald Trump and his run for the presidency in 2016.

He could have been a Ross Perot type fizzle-out had he not monopolized a key issue- viz. immigration. What no one predicted was that the professional politicians were tender little flowers who would weep copiously and shit themselves if he tweeted something mean about them. 

Trump was a departure from the past in so many ways—his bizarre personality,

which suited a real-estate mogul who was also a Reality TV star 

his ignorance of public policy,

Reagan and Dubya were probably just as ignorant. So what?

and his flouting of democratic norms.

No such things exist.  

But perhaps the most significant sense in which Trump was different was ideological.

He was different because he had never taken a Government pay-check.  

For decades, the Republican Party had espoused a set of ideas that could be described as the Reagan formula.

The Republican party had various wings. I suppose Zakaria sees Reagan as in the Goldwater mould. However, the 'Reagan coalition' crucially involved disgruntled white blue-collar workers who felt abandoned by the Democrats. 

Ronald Reagan became an extraordinarily popular Republican by advocating limited government,

just like Carter.  

low taxes, cuts to government spending, a muscular military, and the promotion of democracy abroad. He also ran on a platform that was socially conservative

the key to his successive victories.  

—in favor of banning abortion, for instance—but he often downplayed these parts of the program, particularly once in office. To his many fans, Reagan was a sunny, optimistic figure who celebrated America's free markets, openness to trade, and generous immigration policies and wanted to spread its democratic model to the rest of the world.

'Star Wars' was the idea that Americans didn't need to maintain bases in far off countries so as to protect their Homeland from missiles.   

Trump argued against most elements of the Reagan formula.

NAFTA? 

While he did advocate some of the same policies—low taxes and limits on abortions—he devoted the vast majority of his time and energy to a very different agenda. Trump's hour-long campaign speeches could be boiled down to four lines: The Chinese are taking away your factories. The Mexicans are taking away your jobs. The Muslims are trying to kill you. I will beat them all up and make America great again.

The problem here is that it really was true that Companies had shut down factories on US soil and opened them in China. Mexicans really were competing for various types of jobs- and getting them because they worked harder or were more skilled. Jihadi Muslims did show up to blow up planes or just shoot up random strangers. What is bizarre is why Americans didn't vote for someone who promised to make their country utterly shit.

It was a message of nationalism, chauvinism, protectionism, and isolationism.

No. The message was- Hilary is shit. This is now conventional wisdom but it wasn't at that time.  

Trump broke with many core elements of Republican economic orthodoxy,

no such thing existed. Bush called Reaganomics 'Voodoo', but became his Veep happily enough.  

promising to never cut entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, which reversed decades of Republican fiscal conservatism.

This is one reason the Republicans need Trump. He can tell the budget hawks in Congress to shut the fuck up. If they don't, he will give them a mean nickname and broadcast it on Social Media.  

He denounced George W. Bush's military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq and condemned his geopolitical project of spreading democracy.

Who will stand up for Dubya? No one has heard from him since... when was it- 2006? Perhaps he is being held hostage by the Taliban. 

In fact, Trump savaged nearly every Republican standard-nearer in recent memory, and all the party's living presidents and almost all the living nominees rejected him.

None are worth shit.  

And while genuflecting before the Reagan myth, Trump could not have been more different—an angry, pessimistic figure who warned that America was doomed and promised a return to a mythic past.

Trump was like Reagan in that he got elected. He was unlike him in that he didn't get re-elected because he mishandled COVID. Also Biden might lose his temper and punch that fat fuck on live TV. Still, we can't be sure Biden will win again. 

Trump is not alone as a man of the right in breaking with traditional right-wing ideology. In fact, he's part of a global trend.

Of what? Billionaires getting elected despite having no political experience or solid party affiliations? Where else is this happening?  According to available research, billionaire political participation is well above the global average (which is 11 percent) in Russia, Hong Kong and Singapore where it is about 30 or 35 percent. In America it is about 4 percent. 

It should also be remembered that Trump has changed his party affiliation 5 times since 1987. For Zakaria that makes him a 'man of the right'. For us, it makes Zakaria an over-educated fool. 

The liminality of Rafia Zakaria's turd

Rafia Zakaria, a Pakistani American lawyer, whose craziness I have commented on previously, writes of Judith Butler's new book that it  

presents a sharp explication of how the “intensifying phantasmic force of gender” has become the target for all those who fear a world where constructed categories dissipate and expose their own unreality.

In other words, Putin and Xi and Orban and, no doubt, Modi, are all shitting themselves because some people with vaginas dress up like teenage rent-boys. Needless to say, this is because of Neoliberalism.  

For those in the antigender movement, even the thought of such a world, free as it would be from the dominance of colonial epistemology

White peeps didn't just have dicks- which would have been bad enough. Some of them had brains and acquired knowledge. This shows that stuff you find in textbooks are the product of White dicks which continue to RAPE us incessantly. Ban White dicks. They are very evil more particularly because they can cause Whites to have brains and write books. Butler's book is okay. She may be a Jew, but she don't got no dick and thus can't have a brain.  

and compulsory heterosexuality,

Queen Victoria was cool with Lesbians 

is unbearable and thus galvanizing.

Why else did Putin invade Ukraine? It is because Zelensky was dressing up like a girl and having sex with sailors.  

Butler’s discussion of how Black women’s bodies made “women’s medicine” possible is

nonsense. Medicine for women had nothing to do with the color of the skin of the women concerned. Agnodice is the first female physician and midwife recorded in Greek literature.  Trotula De Ruggiero was the first female physician in Italy. She was probably the most famous and important member of the so-called Mulieres Salernitanae (Women from Salerno), a group of women physicians who studied at the Medical School of Salerno and practiced the art of medicine at the end of the first millennium. Both were White and saw only white women because black women did not exist in their vicinity. 

particularly insightful because it reveals the connection between the trans-exclusionary and right-wing vitriol directed

by JK Rowling- right?  

against the dissolution of gender categories and the upholding of the colonial epistemologies that undergird them.

Rafia thinks Emperor Aurangazeb was a cross-dresser. Prophet Muhammad did not condemn the 'xanith' or transvestite (though such people did perform a useful economic function for the harems of the very rich). What happened when the White man came to Ind's coral strand, was that Indians were forced to grow either a dick or a vag. Also, the Viceroy would personally prise apart any dudes he saw copulating with each other. This was the leading cause of the Indian Mutiny.  

In their chapter on the subject, Butler notes that it was the bodies of female Black slaves on which examinations were done.

Not in the places where medicine was advancing most rapidly. Places with a lot of black slaves didn't have much in the way of 'medical examinations'.  

At the same time, Butler tells us that these women were “flesh, not women, since women were presumptively white, and they were not served by the medical treatments they made possible.”

If so the price of black slaves would not have varied according to gender. They would have been sold by weight.  

Gender, Butler explains, “arrives only with whiteness.”

Gender arrived before the gene for whiteness came into existence. It existed in places which had never seen a white man.  

Black flesh exists only as an invisible, undifferentiated mass until reality and permissibility is bestowed upon it by white assessment and categorization.

Butler is white. Since she lacks a dick, she can't do assessment and categorization but repeats any paranoid shit she chances upon.  

This form of genital surveillance was also common in colonial India.

The Arthashastra tells us that, in ancient Magadha, it was one of the duties of the bandhakiposhaka- or keeper of prostitutes. At the time there were both State owned and private brothels. Wherever prostitution has been taxed or otherwise licensed or regulated, there has also been periodic examination of genitals. Soldiers too were subjected to this. Why? The answer is obvious. It was to control the spread of venereal diseases.

One of the first laws that the British passed in the subcontinent was one that made all women subject to forced genital examinations.

No. The first laws passed by the British long predated their gaining 'Nizamat'- i.e. control of the administration. It is not the case that the Brits spent a lot of time surveilling dicks or vaginas. They were in India to make money. It was only over a century after Plassey that the Brits got around to passing the Cantonment Act of 1864. Native states already had such laws or customs. There were also 'Contagious Diseases Acts' for non-Army areas but these were repealed in 1884. The English feminist, Joshephine Butler was a prime mover in this. However, local kotwals quietly used the traditional system of requiring the brothel owner to ensure such checks were carried out. 

Those who did not submit faced imprisonment and criminal charges.

One such appealed to the Court and was released.  

Per Butler’s argument, this too can be seen as an expression of gender surveillance in which the truth of a woman being a woman had to be verified by colonial authorities.

Nonsense! Many women were purdah-nashin. Viceroy wasn't constantly barging into the andaroon demanding to see vaginas. On the other hand, there is considerable evidence that Sherlock Holmes, of Baker Street, disguised himself as a pussy cat so as to meticulously record details of various Indian pussies. 

Also, as historian Durba Mitra points out in her book Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought, body parts from Indian women were collected and stored for British doctors to study.

Did you know that Conan Doyle trained to be a Doctor? That's when he met Sherlock Holmes who had collected lots of Indian vaginas so that British peeps could qualify as Doctors. If you wanted to be a Dentist, you had to have access to a collection of Nigerian dicks. Since Nigerians tend to thump you if you try taking away their dicks, Britain lagged behind in dentistry.  

Some parallels can be drawn between these acts of domination through the examination of genitalia then and legislation to allow genital examinations of minors in countries like Sweden now, under the purported umbrella of identifying cases of female genital cutting.

Did you know that a swede is actually a root vegetable? In Sweden, these are generally found inside vaginas. Neoliberalism is causing that country to try to increase rutabaga exports by forcible examination of vaginas. Their claim that they are trying to detect and punish female genital mutilation is just a cover story. 

Butler’s genealogical examination of gender reaches into the past,

when White men invented vaginas and installed them in Black women under Colonialism.  

but its probative value also lies in providing contemporary feminists tools to understand the present.

Sweden has joined NATO. Why? Obviously, their soldiers want to come and search your vagina just in case some rutabaga can be found hiding there. Wake up sheeple! Capitalism is seeking to avert its final crisis by surveilling your genitalia. 

The idea of “phantasmagoria” as a wildly obsessive force is an apt explication of the obsession with curbing reproductive choice.

i.e. killing fetuses.  

The pregnant person presents a riddle of liminality and a challenge to categorization in that it is impossible to delineate exactly where the person ends and the fetus begins.

Where does Rafia end and where does the turd in her colon begin? A person who needs to take a dump presents a riddle of liminality.  

Saying life begins at conception is a literal effort to insist on the reality and naturalness of constructed categories by endowing them with artificial certainty that is then affirmed in law.

Saying Rafia is full of shit is a literal effort to insist on the reality and naturalness of 'constructed categories' which differentiate her from a turd. Why is the law affirming this distinction? If it is okay to flush a turd down the toilet, why is it not okay to do the same to Rafia? After all, it is only because of 'colonial epistemology' that she is considered a human being with legal rights rather than a lump of shit. 

Finally, it is hopeful that Butler sees transnational feminism as a basis for solidarity against the antigender movement.

Because the thing is already known to be utterly useless against anything else. Hopefully, after taking on the 'antigender movement' it will develop the organizational muscle to oppose the Neoliberal 'right to fart' campaign. 

Such solidarity depends on noting and affirming that “translation often alters the meaning of the term.”

Only if the translation is shit. A solidarity which depends on noting and affirming shit isn't worth a fart.  

It also requires recognition that common cause is to be found in the brutality of imposed gender categories

Mummy is a horrible brute. She dressed me like a little girl. Had she had an ounce of humanity, she would have aborted me so as to express solidarity with hijras.  

and that such an imposition was (and is) an act of colonial dominance.

If Rafia has a vagina, it is because Viceroy Mountbatten cruelly imposed it on her. Thankfully, the IRA killed him. But King Charles has taken over that job. Did you know Kate Middleton was forced by Prince Phillip to grow a vagina? King of Sweden is now demanding the right to surveil her kooch. That is the real story behind this so called 'cancer' diagnosis. Wake up sheeple! Don't believe everything you read in the Daily Mail.  

Butler’s work is an invaluable contribution to how the transnational, and particularly transnational feminism, can still exist without an imposed and requisite universal.

Why should feminism be about peeps with vaginas? Why shouldn't it concern itself with turds?  

It is also a valuable example of how the intersectionality of inequities faced by feminists

e.g the manner in which not having a dick exacerbates the inequity of not having had a satisfactory bowel movement since my period began.  

is confronted by a mad mosaic of fear and desire for dominance that is the phantasmagoric antigender movement.

What Rafia represents is a mad mosaic of fear and the desire to be stupider than a turd. JK Rowling can make lots of money out of 'phantasmagoria'. Had she taken a PhD in whatever shite this lady studied, she too could be utterly useless.  

Kaushik Basu & why academic Econ is shite

Economists never enjoyed any high prestige. Inventors and industrialists were folk heroes. It was only when, because of total War or the Great Depression, or the post-War Bretton Woods straitjacket,  Governments had to intervene on a very large scale that a few Professors were enlisted to polish the turd that was Government Economic policy. In India, the public had lost confidence in economists by about 1958. However, under UPA- because Manmohan was an economist- there was a brief period when there was some interest in the latest Ivy League Professor brought in for cosmetic purposes as Chief Economic Advisor.  

In a paper titled 'the state of Economics, the state of the world' Kaushik Basu, who was CEA between 2009 and 2012- wrote-  

Since the World Bank’s engagement is primarily with development economics, it may be worthwhile to point out that development economics, like economic theory, has had its moments of epiphany.

Both were playing catch-up with what had already happened to the economy centuries ago.  

Arthur Lewis had been troubled by two problems. First, there was the age‐old question of why industrial products, such as steel, were so much more expensive than agricultural products.

The answer was obvious. Agricultural produce grows on the land. To get iron ore and coal to produce steel, you have to dig deep under the earth. Steel has become much much cheaper relative to agricultural produce over the last 2500 years.  

Second, why were some countries persistently poor, while others were so rich? 

All countries were persistently poor till some developed new technologies and underwent demographic transition.  

  In an autobiographical essay, Lewis (1980) writes about his eureka moment in 1952: “Walking down the road in Bangkok, it came to me suddenly that both problems have the same solution.

Sadly, it wasn't the correct solution- which I gave above.  

Throw away the neoclassical assumption that the quantity of labor is fixed.

This means that the poor peasant can hire Elon Musk to create robots to do his work for him. He can also hire various Super-Models to entertain him in his new-found hours of leisure.  

An unlimited supply of labor will keep wages down,

No. It would make labor a 'free good'. I could have as many butlers and chambermaids as I desired. They would not need feeding.  

What Lewis had not noticed was that it was 'Advanced countries' where the labour supply could rise without any loss of productivity in any other sector. This is because women wanted to get the fuck out of the house and get jobs and rise up. 

producing cheap coffee in the first case and high profits in the second.

Steel is often an unprofitable industry. There is an 'accelerator' effect. In an upswing there may be large profits. In a downswing there may be large losses.  

The result is a dual national or world economy…”

Lewis was black. The duality he saw had a lot to do with Racism and the superior military technology of the 'Master' races.  

This was the genesis of his classic paper on dual economies in the Manchester School in 1954, which would play a major role in his being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1979, and in triggering research in development economics.

By then there had been a lot of actual development. Japan had risen up. Thailand and the other 'Tiger economies' were also doing so by embracing 'export led growth' and getting rural girls into giant factory dormitories. Lewis was useless. It wasn't true that you could frictionlessly move rural folk into manufacturing industry or high value adding services in the same country, or region. There was emigration from agricultural areas, but this went hand in hand with implicit real wage/service provision discrimination such that urban folk gained 'economic rent'. In other words, there was a hidden cost to development- but if migrants found ways to 'internalize' negative externalities- i.e. if they found their own solutions to their collective action problems- they too could gain. 

 Intuition and Causality I turn now, more specifically, to the subject of development policy.

That subject is 'Tardean mimetics'- imitate what your superiors are doing. Tell economists to fuck off. Accountants and Entrepreneurs are all you need.  

For the project of converting research to good policy, we need, in my opinion, three ingredients: data (and evidence), theory (and deductive reasoning), and intuition (and common sense).

No. For good policy you just need good policy. Research does not matter. Theory does not matter. Imitate what has worked for your superiors. Tell academics to fuck off.  

One of the great achievements of economics, in recent decades, has been in the area of empirical analysis.

But Davenant and King had empirically demonstrated the law of demand in the seventeenth fucking century! Adam Smith was playing catch up except he never actually caught up.  

There is reason to celebrate the rise of data and our ability to analyze data using different methods, from intelligent bar charts, through simple regression analysis and structural models, to randomized control trials.

No there isn't. Successful countries didn't bother with that shit. Still, you can earn a little money teaching it to kids who were too stupid to get into Medical Skool.  

This recent success raises hope of economics becoming a truly useful science (see Banerjee and Duflo 2011; Duflo and Kremer 2005).

But Banerjee and Duflo are useless. Measuring poverty is like measuring your dick. It has no magical effect. The poor remain poor and your dick remains tiny.  

There is, however, a propensity among some economists to dismiss all theory as esoteric. Among other dangers, this has the risk of making our discipline inefficient. Suppose we insisted that Pythagoras could only use empirical methods. Would he ever get to his theorem? The answer is he might. If he collected a large number of right‐angled triangles and measured the squares on their sides, he may have hit upon the conjecture of the two smaller squares adding up to the one on the hypotenuse.

Basu is merely saying that pure math is useful because it can be applied. The question was whether pure development theory could be applied? The answer was, no. It was stupid shit. 

But this would be extremely inefficient.

The mathematical theory of Trade and Development turned out to be a waste of resources. Control theory in production econ might be okay- but leave that to the engineers.  

Moreover, there would be a lot of debating and dissent. Some would charge him of using a biased sample of right‐angled triangles, all from the Mediterranean region. “Would it work in the Arctic, in the southern hemisphere?” they would query. 

It does not work for a reason Einstein explained. We don't live in an Euclidean universe.  

   We must acknowledge that there are many truths that can be discovered more efficiently and more compellingly using pure reason.

Empirical correlations are observed. Only tautologies can be 'discovered'. Otherwise you have 'natural deduction systems'. But they are only as good as their underlying structural causal model. If that is good, you can change the world directly.  

Further, there is a great deal of sloppiness in the way we reason about the use of evidence. For instance, hard‐headed practitioners will often tell you the following: “If we do not have any evidence whether or not some policy X works, we must not implement X.” (I was told exactly this fairly recently, in response to a suggestion I made.)  

Nobody tells the entrepreneur or the inventor that. But we do tell bureaucrats or politicians that they should not be allowed to do stupid shit with our tax dollars.  

Let me call this rule in quotes an axiom.

Just call it a rule. In law, if you- as an Agent- have been hired to give evidence based policy recommendations, that is what you have to do. If you are a Principal- e.g. an entrepreneur- you are not subject to this rule. Sadly, this also means a crazy guy like Nkrumah can tell Arthur Lewis to go fuck himself because the former was the Head of State. The latter was merely an advisor.  

To see that this is an unreasonable axiom, observe that if we do not have any evidence whether or not X works, we do not have any evidence whether or not not‐X works.

Rubbish! We have no evidence that insisting that CAT scans only be performed by actual cats will improve outcomes. This does not mean that we have no evidence that CAT scans performed by trained humans are worth having.  

But since we have to do X or not‐X, that original axiom has to be flawed.  

If we are already doing not-X because it is useful then there is evidence it works.  

For good policy we need facts and evidence, but we also need deduction and reasoning.

No. A good policy may be implemented by a guy who has good intuition but who can't reason worth shit.  

We can go a step further and make a case for using mathematics.

We can also make a case that CAT scans should be performed by actual cats. This is because cats are cute.  

While the use of mathematics can be overdone and that has happened in economics, the immense achievements of Cournot (1838) and Walras (1877), and of modern economics, would not have happened without it.

But modern econ hasn't achieved shit. Entrepreneurs and politicians who decided to imitate what works best have propelled us to a much higher level of prosperity.  

This is because mathematics is a disciplining device, even though it is demanding and clearly not something meant for all. As Krugman (2016, p.23), not being able to make up his mind if a particular argument of Mervyn King (2016) was right, observes, “[W]ords alone can create an illusion of logical coherence that dissipates when you try to do the math.”    

The opposite is even more true. Arrow-Debreu looks logical. Then you realize Language would not exist in an Arrow-Debreu world. The thing is nonsense.  

  The power of doing a model right, even if it is abstract and uses assumptions that may not be real, can be seen from general equilibrium. Take Gerard Debreu’s classic The Theory of Value. This is a book of great beauty, as spare as poetry.

But, it refers to a world where there would be no Language and thus no poetry.  

In some ways, it is comparable to the work of Euclid, for it brings together in a systematic way an amazing range of ideas.

It is stupid. A topological existence proof is meaningless if there is impredicativity or intensions have unknown extensions. Thus Arrow-Debreu could not prove anything at all. It is no good saying 'a price vector' with such and such quality exists if its extension is unknowable. This is because the thing isn't actually a vector nor are there any actual underlying sets. I might say 'the true cat is the being such that none better able to perform CAT scans is conceivable.' But no such true cats can be found. There is no extension fitting the intension. 

Euclid may not have been as original as Pythagoras or Archimedes, but in bringing intellectual order to a scattered discipline, he had few peers, and he served an enormous role in the progress of knowledge.

No. He played a role in the progress of mathematics. But mathematics is not knowledge of anything other than itself just like poetry or Socioproctology. Why? If such knowledge existed then some truth can be 'known to be known' a priori. But, if so, there there must also be a 'true cat' which alone knows how to best perform CAT scans.  

Likewise with Debreu’s slim book.   The path‐breaking general‐equilibrium model of Walras, Arrow, and Debreu

was useless. By the early Seventies, it became clear it was 'anything goes' because of hedging and income effects even absent Knightian uncertainty. Anyway, coevolved systems are 'far from equilibrium'.  

provided a template that sparked some of the most original works in microeconomic theory, by Akerlof and Stiglitz, prominently, which has to do with modeling the functioning of markets under imperfect information.

But markets changed as technology changed such that there was an arms race between screening and signaling devices. Akerlof also had an utterly useless theory of the Indian caste system. Stiglitz went utterly bonkers. He praised Chavez. 

This has greatly enhanced our understanding of micro‐markets, why markets fail, why prices are often endogenously rigid, resulting in credit markets with excess demand and labor markets with excess supply.

These guys didn't understand shit. That's why they didn't become billionaires playing the markets.  

This research also has hopes of improving our macroeconomic analysis since, as we know, Keynesian macroeconomic analysis, like Arthur Lewis’s dual economy model, makes extensive use of price rigidities, and neither Keynes nor Lewis had an explanation for these rigidities.

Nonsense! Keynes knew about cartels and trade unions. Lewis knew that if workers don't get enough to eat, they stop being workers.  

Thanks to the work of Stiglitz and a few others, we now have a formal understanding of open unemployment and credit markets that do not clear despite the absence of exogenous restrictions on interest rate movements.

Everybody else knew about this back in the days of ancient Sumer. Arbitrage occurred even before the first coins were minted by ancient City-States.  

Alongside these positive theories, we saw the rise of normative economics.

Scolding the economy rather than scolding the environment. Why not scold cats till they become true cats and perform more perfect CAT scans?

Perched between analytical philosophy, mathematical logic, and the social sciences, this was a remarkable achievement.

It was utterly useless. True, a few cretins like Basu could get PhDs in this shit so as to teach other cretins. But, what else are you to do with cretins? The point about mathematical econ was it meant to keep busy the sort of nutter who might otherwise turn into a rabid Maoist. 

There were major contributions from Samuelson, Bergson (1938), and others, but the truly astonishing breakthrough was Ken Arrow’s (1951) slim book: Social Choice and Individual Values.

It too was based on the intensional fallacy.

Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem became the bedrock of an enormous research agenda.

Wholly useless.  

The leading figure here was Amartya Sen, whose work, straddling philosophy and economics, demonstrated that it is possible to bring the finest traditions of theory and          mathematical logic to bear on age‐old questions of ethics and normative principles (Sen 1970; see also Suzumura 1983).

What was the upshot? More hot air.  

This work brought into the mainstream of rigorous analysis concepts such as rights, which were widely talked about but seldom subjected to careful scrutiny (Sen 1996).

Fuck off! Hohfeld told us everything we needed to know about rights and obligations. If there is no incentive compatible remedy, the right will not be effective or else will be rationed.  

This body of work has been important for the World Bank, since its mission goals have foundations in it (World Bank 2015b), and also in related country‐specific research (Subramanian and Jayaraj 2016).    

Useless shite. Edwin Lim had helped China rise. He couldn't do the same for India because the Rights-based activists gained more by preventing the World Blank finance infrastructure investment than the decent Punjabi economists like Manmohan and Montek.  

       It is worth digressing for a moment to note that data and statistics belong to a larger domain of inquiry, which has to do with description.

It would only be worth making this digression if you were talking to imbeciles.  

Doing descriptive social science is often treated as a pejorative,

No it isn't. My degree is in 'Analytical and Descriptive' Econ. It doesn't try to shit higher than its arsehole.  

which is unfortunate, since, as Amartya Sen (1980) points out in a powerful essay, good description is not easy and a huge amount of the progress of science depends on description.

Good description is easy enough for any useful purpose.  

Description, be it in words or data, entails choice.

It entails correspondence with the facts. This means there is less 'choice' than when speaking imaginatively. 

Description is not regurgitating everything we see around us. We have to pick what is vital and make that available to others. How we describe and what we describe shapes our understanding of the world.

Nonsense! I may describe everybody I meet as a shithead but I am careful to consult a Doctor of high reputation rather than place my faith in a Quack.  

The “describer” is therefore a pivotal agent.  

If the subject is important, there may be a market for descriptions with the more accurate gaining more market share. But, we may disregard descriptions and focus on other clues- e.g. if everybody describes Satyajit Ray's 'Sonar Kella' as 'mesmerizing' but if nobody turns up for its screening then you understand it is as boring as shit. By contrast, if you see a big queue for 'Sholay', that's the movie you go to see. 

It is important to be aware that description can take many forms.

Only in the sense that it is important to breathe. If you aren't already doing it, you are probably dead.  

What the anthropologist describes often does not take the form of numbers and data.

It takes the shape of stupid shit he pulled out of his arse.  

But the descriptions of what he or she has seen and, more importantly, experienced is vital for our understanding of the world. The concept of “thick description,” which we owe to Gilbert Ryle (1968) and Clifford Geertz (1973) and has been used by umpteen anthropologists, has vastly enhanced our understanding of traditional and remote societies and enabled us to intervene more effectively.

Fuck off! Anthropology turned to shit long ago- supposing it wasn't always shit. Still, there was a time when the Anthropology Dept. had the best drugs probably because it was filled with CIA agents.  

At times this intervention has been for the wrong reasons, for instance, to enable colonial domination;

Kenyatta was an anthropologist. He thought female circumcision was a very good thing. His descendants are very rich.  

but it has also helped to carry the development agenda further by helping extend the reach of modern medicine and education.

Which is what the Colonialists and the Missionaries did.  

Historically, we have learned about the motivation and purpose of other lives, which are distant from us, through the ardor and work of anthropologists.

No we haven't. We used to read the National Geographic because of all the bare breasted ladies featured there. Now we have Pornhub.  

These are very difficult to learn and comprehend with data and statistics alone. Living with the subject and acquiring an intuitive understanding is often a necessity. This knowledge has been put to good and bad uses, to help the poor living in distant lands and in traditional societies, and also to exploit people and spread imperialism and colonial control.  For good or for bad, the knowledge has been useful. The absence of such knowledge can be a big handicap.

It didn't stop lots of Indians making good money setting up shops in remote parts of darkest Africa.  

Consider terrorism. Because of the dangers associated with terrorist groups, we do not have studies of the kind anthropologists provided for remote societies. This is causing an insurmountable knowledge divide.

No it isn't. Torturers employed by Intelligence Agencies have a pretty good idea of what is going on. The Brits dealt with Indian terror cells pretty successfully. Independent India built on those skills.  

     Finally, a word of caution. The skeptics, from Pyrrho to David Hume and Bertrand Russell, were right; neither fact nor deduction can take you all the way to the best policy to implement.

God can, though those who claim He talks to them may have other ideas.  

The reason is that causality, whether or not it is there, can never be demonstrated.

It can be demonstrated well enough. If you have the right Structural Causal Model you can change outcomes- e.g. curing blindness by performing a particular type of surgery.  

In the end, causality lies in the eyes of the beholder.

No. Eyes are irrelevant.  

For me the most thought‐provoking observation on this comes from a tribesman from Nepal. The famous National Geographic photographer, Eric Valli, seeing the high trees these tribesmen climbed to gather honey, asked one of them if they don’t ever fall down from those trees. The answer he received was: “Yes, you fall when your life is over.”

The meaning is 'we are forced to do this dangerous work. Thus, we take a fatalistic view. What is the alternative? Will you give me some money so I can retire? No? Then, fuck off.'  

    Given the impossibility of discovering causality, for good policy it is not enough to have the facts; not enough to combine them with theory. I am convinced we need one more ingredient: common sense and what I have elsewhere called “reasoned intuition” (Basu 2014).   

None of this is true. Imitate what smarter peeps are doing or have done. Tell economists to fuck the fuck off. China rose by emulating its richer neighbors. India was prevented from doing so by blathershites who prated about 'equity' from their Ivy league ivory towers.  

Researchers refuse to admit it, but it is true that there is no escape from the use of intuition, and the bulk of what we call “knowledge” that we acquire through life occurs casually, mainly by using common sense.

Fuck knowledge. Just imitate smart peeps. Fake it till you make it.  

It would be a mistake to insist that all knowledge has to be rooted in scientific method, such as controlled experiments.

Not in specific fields. I don't want to take an untested drug though, if desperate, I may have no other choice. But this yields statistical information.  

If one pauses to think of the number of things a child learns through non‐scientific methods, it is quite staggering.  

Mimetics is so effective because Evolution gave us something like 'mirror neurons'.  

As to why such knowledge, acquired through intuition and common sense, may have value, we have to recognize that our intuitions are what they are by evolution.

No. Our propensity for mimetic behavior, not any intuition we may currently have, is the product of evolution.  

They have survived natural selection and so their power must not be dismissed out of hand.

We mimic others who have learned to suppress instinctual or 'intuitive' responses. This is why, within a short period of joining the army, peaceful citizens are soon behaving like ferocious warriors.  

Evolution has shaped a lot of what we see in our economic life; this is widely acknowledged, but our understanding of the interface between evolution and economics, for which some foundations were laid by Maynard Smith and Price quite some time ago (see Maynard Smith and Price 1973; Weibull 1995) remains rudimentary.

Not really. Evolutionary Econ has burgeoned. What is strange is that Basu does not understand 'uncorrelated asymmetries'- e.g. that by which the guys doing best can be identified and emulated. Tardean mimetics is a 'bourgeois strategy'. I may mention that Evolution seems to use a Multiplicative Weighting Update algorithm like 'Hannan Consistency' to deal with Knightian Uncertainty. The math of co-evolved processes tames complexity something fierce. 

There is a foray into this in the conference book in the context of morality and other‐regarding behavior and their origins (see also Alger and Weibull 2013). But it is arguable that there are many other domains where this applies. The way common people acquire knowledge may not meet the test of scientific standards but cannot be dismissed out of hand.

Only in the sense that we can't dismiss out of hand the possibility that all those who perform CAT scans are truly cats.  

At the same time, one cannot be unmindful of the fact that casual empiricism can lead to superstitions that we have to guard against. I have argued elsewhere (Basu 2014) that what we need is “reasoned intuition,” that is, the use of intuition vetted by reasoning.

Why not argue that we need to use reasonable respiration to prevent ourselves suffocating?  

This is not a surefire method but the best we can do.  

Speak for yourself. I am able to breathe through my asshole.  

Data, theory, and intuition are the three ingredients for human knowledge and progress.

No. Experimentation and entrepreneurship are of the essence. You can have lots of data and a hefty theoretical apparatus and plenty of good intuitions while remaining useless and unproductive.  

But even with all three in place, skepticism, as philosophers through the ages have reminded us and as Keynes did in chapter 12 of General Theory, must be a part of the thinking person’s mindset.

Even more importantly, the thinking person should take a dump from time to time. I often used to remind Keynes of this but he would tell me to fuck off because he was dead and thus no longer needed to defecate. Nobody can say my three years at the LSE were entirely wasted.  

One problem with scientists who lash out against superstition but do not question scientific knowledge is the double standard. They fail to recognize that, when it comes to certainty about the future, scientific wisdom is as much open to question as many other forms of knowledge.

This is also the problem I have with the neighbor's cat. When I mention Pyrrho, it does nothing but purr. This is highly vexatious behavior. World Bank should take action.  

 Knowledge and Caveats As we head into uncharted territory and struggle with the world’s economic problems, recent ones include the United Kingdom’s vote in favor of exiting the European Union (I suspect this will persist in being an important problem when the conference book is published)., In addition, the decline in commodity prices, especially that of oil, is creating a lot of stress in commodity‐exporting nations and corporations that had invested in this sector. Questions are being raised about the readiness of the discipline of economics.

It was supremely unready for COVID or Ukraine or Gaza. But this un-readiness did not greatly matter. Nobody expects economics professors to ever say anything sensible.  

The first thing to recognize, however, is not that economists misread or underestimated the crisis,

there was no crisis compared to what was to come 

but how this crisis shows that there is still a lot about the economy that we do not know.

Unless we can make a lot of money finding out 

   In any discipline, there is the disadvantage of not knowing exactly what we do not know.

Not if it is disciplined. Econ isn't. It is shit.  

Take, for instance, medicine. Given how little we know about the human body and brain, when we go to the doctor with health problems, in a vast majority of cases the right answer for the doctor to give is: “I have no idea.”

No. The right answer is 'your problem could be x for which we have a treatment. If, however, it is y, start making your Will. Meanwhile I'll arrange for tests at the Hospital.  

But we seldom hear this. Doctors almost invariably tell you what your problem is.

No. You tell them what your problem is. If they say 'I'll tell you your real problem. You are a worthless pile of shite.' you realize it isn't your G.P you are talking to. It is your Mummy who is scolding you.  

What should warn you that when doctors says they know what your ailment is but they often do not is that, even in the 18th century, well before the arrival of modern medicine, doctors seldom said they had no idea what ailed the patient. This is because doctors in the 18th century did not know and doctors now do not know what they did not and do not know.

Eighteenth century Doctors had the wrong structural causal model. Still, they were quite good at some things which is why they could make a bit of money.  

It is much the same with economists.    Among the areas of darkness that hamper development policy is our inability to link the micro and the macro.

What hampers 'development policy' is blathershites who don't get that development is about mimetics not mathematics or scolding Society.  

Suppose a government undertakes some intervention X in a thousand villages. X can be a conditional cash transfer, an employment creation program, or provision of a fertilizer subsidy. How do we evaluate the success of the program in removing poverty?

We don't unless we are paid a little money to do so. But that is wasted money. An intervention which folks in villages can end up fully financing themselves is one that is 'scalable' and which will actually raise people out of poverty. Otherwise, the donor gets to decide to do stupid shit and the economists have to go along with that stupid shit in order to get paid for 'Project evaluation'.  

Typically, we do this by collecting data on the well‐being of the people in these villages. If we are fussy, we may use all kinds of controls, including proper randomization.

Rossi's metallic laws apply. The one thing we can predict about any intervention is that a detailed and wide enough a study will show it was ineffective or mischievous.  

Suppose, through such a study, it is found that poverty has indeed gone down in the villages where X was implemented. Does this mean X is a good intervention? Not necessarily. Suppose the intervention X in a village has the following effect. It raises food prices a little and raises wages more.

Why would it raise food prices? There will be arbitrage. One may say 'food moved in from more deprived areas', but, if food prices have risen then there must be some market imperfection or high transport costs. Focus on that.  

This will indeed lead to lower poverty in the village. But since a rise in food prices typically cascades across the whole economy,

only if there are open markets and transport isn't a big problem. But, in that case local food prices won't rise.  

this intervention could mean that in other villages, which will only feel the full rise in food prices and a negligible effect on wages, poverty will rise.

That's what happens if food is sucked in from more deprived regions. 

So it is entirely possible that the nationwide effect of the intervention will be no effect on poverty or even an increase in poverty, though poverty falls in the villages in which the intervention occurs. 

Indeed, there may be a mischievous type of 'crowding out'. Smart peeps in the poor country prefer to work for AID programs rather than set up enterprises. Dependency has increased. Sooner or later there is 'compassion fatigue' or else a financial crunch. The country finds itself worse off than if it had tried to rise by its own efforts.  

These links between micro interventions and macro effects are poorly understood.

Only if we are paid to pretend to not understand the fucking obvious.  

We need to invest in this kind of research much more if we

are using other people's money. If it is our own, we say 'we don't need no stinking research.'  

are to succeed in battling nationwide and even global poverty and to combat inequality.   

Very true. Suppose some scammers steal Basu's identity and grab all his money. Will he do research on global poverty and the combatting of inequality or will he try to get his money back or- if that is impossible- look around for the quickest path to restore his opulence? This may involve setting up his own 'Only Fans' account. 

There are other micro‐theoretic areas, such as, finance and the psychological foundations of human behavior, where economics has made great strides,

some new fads were created. What happened to 'nudge'?  

and which receive attention in the conference book. But there are still many open questions. In finance there is an increasing recognition that there is no such thing as an ideal regulation.

When was this not known? Something like 'Goodhart's law' was known to medieval City states.  

This is because financial products are amenable to endless innovation. Banks and financial organizations will keep developing new productsthe way the medical industry keeps discovering new drugs. And with each such financial innovation we may need to modify and make our regulatory regime more sophisticated. Hence, this is one area where we have to reject the language of optimal regulation, which has a static connotation, and be prepared to have regulatory bodies that are flexible and ready themselves to innovate.

Competition between jurisdictions would have that effect though it is likely you will have differentiated 'Tiebout models'.  

This is complicated by the fact that in signing on to financial products people are often not rational and instead give in to emotions, hyperbolic discounting, and framing delusions, as pointed out repeatedly in the new behavioral economics literature. 

There is a bandwagon effect or 'the madness of crowds'. But the bigger problem is there are enormous technological and geopolitical changes underway. This was not obvious at the time of Brexit. But it is obvious now.  

  One possibility is to think of labeling certain financial products as “prescription goods” and creating the equivalent of doctors in finance who have to sign off before a person is allowed to buy a financial product. We could, for instance, decide to allow a balloon mortgage but before someone can commit to it, one has to get a “finance doctor” to sign off on the financial viability of the person to take on such a contract. This cannot be done by mechanically following practices in medicine, but there is a case for giving serious thought to such an architecture.  

Basu forgets that there were 'prescription mills' feeding America's opioid addiction. Moreover, real estate bubbles were not prevented by licensing realtors or requiring valuations from Chartered Surveyors.  

    The interface between economics and psychology, and, more specifically, behavioral economics, has witnessed great strides; and we have tried recently to bring this to bear on the agenda of development policy, with our World Development Report on Mind, Society, and Behavior (see World Bank 2015a). By drawing on evidence from laboratory experiments and field observations from around the world, behavioral economics teaches us a lot on how and where we should intervene.

What did it teach the World Bank about how to respond to COVID? Nothing at all. It turns out going for herd immunity is the only option for most of the world.  

However, there is a risk of this discipline becoming a catalogue of findings. I call this a risk because of a propensity to think of the findings as set in stone, not realizing that they may be true in some societies at certain stages of development, and could be different at other places and other times.   What is also needed is an effort to marry these findings more effectively with the concept of equilibrium

Why? The link between liquidity and volatility are much better understood now. Moreover, 'private information' is burgeoning more rapidly for a variety of reasons. Thus we are speaking of 'far from equilibrium' dynamics.  

(Akerlof and Shiller 2015) so that we can leverage them to get much more out of them and also to be able to predict better how these findings are likely to change from one society to another and also evolve over time. To my mind, one of the great contributions of traditional economics is the idea of equilibrium, which has many manifestations, from the general competitive equilibrium to Nash.

correlated equilibria are a better solution concept.  

The needed agenda is to broaden the description of individuals from the narrow homo economicus to that of more real individuals with quirks, irrationalities, and social norms, and then use the idea of equilibrium in conjunction with this.

Why bother? There is an arms race between 'public signals' and screening devices which maintain separating equilibria.  

 What makes this intellectually challenging is that for most real phenomena, which seemingly rely on human irrationality or adherence to social norms, it is possible, with analytical ingenuity, to reach the same conclusion with perfectly rational individuals.

Or, better yet with Muth rationality provided we understand that for any coordination game there can be a discoordination game permitting hedging and income effects.  

In the end this calls for the use of judgement and intuition in deciding what assumptions we should rely on. The World Bank has been increasingly engaged in this difficult area.

But it can only hire the second rate and thus is doomed to play catch up.  

One important arena of policy making, a big task faced by those at the helm of policy, is the control of corruption. Traditional economics treated an act of corruption, whether to pay a bribe to get an illegal electricity connection or not, on par with whether to buy an apple or not—an exercise in narrow cost‐benefit analysis (see Bardhan 1997; Mishra 2006).

Bardhan and Mishra weren't 'traditional economists' by any means. The standard view was that the thing was a crime. It should be punished. However, since the underlying problem was that of inelasticity and thus economic rent, the solution involved either suppressing the market, if it was repugnant, or else opening it up and thus raising elasticity and getting rid of economic rent.  

It is not surprising that we have been so singularly unsuccessful in controlling corruption.

At the World Bank? Do its officers pay bribes to get nice assignments?  

To understand this phenomenon it is important to bring in psychology and political institutions.

Only if it is important to do so in the case of rape and murder. I suppose, in a corrupt enough country you can get away with both.  

Development policy cannot be built on economics alone.

It should be built on scolding Society. Also, senior officials should admonish cats to properly perform CAT scans.  

 Money and the Man of Influence  ...something I learned by fire, during my nearly three years as a policy maker in India, 2009‐12. Although monetary policy was not my charge, it became clear during this time that many of our interventions were based on imitating policies followed by central banks in advanced economies, unmindful of the fact that their contexts differed.

Why was this? The answer is that Manmohan wanted to carry out fundamental reforms and felt that reduced reliance on the Left meant this was now feasible for UPA. He would soon use the excuse of Moody downgrading as an equivalent to the foreign-exchange crisis of the early Nineties which had enabled him to reform Trade policy. Thus his strategy had to do with pretending the RBI was like the Fed and that a poor country like India needed to please the markets in the same way the OECD countries did. But, for India, RBI is merely there to raise money for the Government. It can't protect non-existent 'widows and orphans' or 'Institutional investors'. Still, hiring Rajan- albeit a cosmetic move- did rally markets. 

        One reason for this deficiency is that we do not understand the functioning and role of money in a market economy the way we understand, for instance, the Walrasian general equilibrium system for real goods and services.

Our understanding of Walras' law is like our understanding that it would be nice if cats could perform CAT scans.  

Money in general equilibrium was part of a big research agenda in the 1980s, but has remained incomplete.

We don't know what is or isn't money. The thing is credit, that is faith.  

One reason for this is that it is mathematically a very hard problem.

like the problem of figuring out which neurons must fire in feline brains if cats are to perform CAT scans.  

But it must not be abandoned for that reason.

Because one should never abandon doing useless shit.  

In the rush to solve the next morning’s problem, often these deep questions take a back seat.

like the very deep question of whether dogs will be upset if cats perform CAT scans.  

But as the world struggles to cope with the slowdown and the widespread use of negative interest rates does not seem to work, and in fact has a negative backlash from which no one is able to individually break out, it is important for economists to keep up some of this fundamental research.

Because, otherwise, there might be 'gain of function' research in a lab in Wuhan which causes a global pandemic- right?  

If the full general equilibrium model took some 75 years, from Jevons and Walras to Arrow and Debreu,

and was discovered to be useless within 25 years.  

and the study of money in equilibrium started in earnest in the 1970s and 1980s, we have little reason to abandon it as unsolvable.

Money is faith in its ability to command future resources. You can arbitrarily fix it at any value so as to show that true cats are indeed performing CAT scans.  

To see the mystifying nature of money, one can look at a very different problem—the power of peddlers of influence. With the U.S. presidential election in the offing, there is a lot of writing about lobbying, influence peddling, and corruption. In my youth in India, I remember talk about “persons of influence,” referred to in those days as “men of influence.”

or 'dalals'- i.e. pimps or fixers who could get your work done for you.  

I recall being baffled by one particular person and wondered why he was so well‐off. He had no special skill, no resource. He was just the man of influence (let me call him M). In those days, there was a wait of six years to get a phone connection. If you needed it sooner, you could try calling M and requesting his help. He would call up the relevant person in government; and more often than not the favor would be done. If someone needed to get a child into a good school, she could ask M and if M agreed he would request the school principal to make an exception and take in this kid out of turn. It struck me much later what he was doing and I wrote it up as a model of the man of influence (Basu 1986). M was a person with a mental ledger of favors done. If i needed something from j, whom she did not know, she could ask M to ask j. Then j would do the favor not because j cared for i or ever expected to need a special favor from i, but because j knew that someday he would need a favor from k and would need M to make a request to k. It is M that no one wanted to offend because M was a clearinghouse with a memory. This is what made M a man of influence.

We may say he was a 'market maker'. He was 'netting out' transactions he facilitated for a profit. However, it is likely that he had a political patron- e.g. Chandraswami who had Narasimha's ear. Sadly, in most such cases, there is an element of fraud. Some paid big money and got nothing. They may have had to pretend otherwise or else the vultures would have started circling. 

In some sense, a man of influence is like money or blockchain. It is a record of information and works only because everybody thinks it will work.

It may be a Ponzi scheme. The Dalal may turn out to be a Natwarlal.  

This description and even the model is easy enough. But its integration into a full general equilibrium model is extremely hard

it is easy enough if you introduce a category of ontologically dysphoric goods whose supply is its own demand. Did you know that the Institute of Socioproctology can certify your cat to perform CAT scans for the low low price of $ 9.99?  All the dogs in the neighborhood will be so jelly. 

and remains an open agenda, thereby handicapping policy makers greatly and forcing them to rely on intuition and guesswork more than hopefully will be necessary in the future. 

Policy makers don't look at general equilibrium models. It is known that their solution is a time class exponential to the life-time of this Universe.  It is a different matter that you might pay a guy a little money to pretend otherwise. But then you can also get CAT certification for Moggie. 

  Politics and Economics In discussing development policy, I have been stressing the role of economic theory and empirical economics in brief, input from professional, scientific analysis. The lack of this dooms many a developing economy.

No. Countries which actually developed- Japan, South Korea, Taiwan etc- didn't bother with mathematical econ though some of them had a few such nutters whom they happily packed off to the LSE or other such places.  

But it is not always easy to marry scientific analysis with the ground realities of politics. Maybe because I moved so abruptly from academe to policy making,

his one achievement, he says, was to get access to the toilet used by senior IAS officers. If even the PM, who was an economist, could not do make policy under UPA, fuck could Basu do?  

I cannot be unmindful of the importance of the role of how one engages with politics and politicians. When I moved from Cornell to the Indian government at the end of 2009, I quickly became aware of the potential conflict between the prescription coming from theoretical economics and political compulsions. One quickly learned that when a politician tells an economist, “You are so good at theory,” it is meant to be a devastating criticism. 

If your boss is saying you are good at something other than your job he is suggesting you were an affirmative action, or otherwise cosmetic, hire. I've often been told I draw very nice pictures of cats by those who had to mark my examination scripts. Sadly, on entering the job market, I no longer received such praise. I was summarily fired.  

  I have recounted in Basu (2015) how at one of my first meetings, in my new job, with the Prime Minister and some of his advisers, discussing how to control food inflation, which was then at double digits, I spoke at some length on changing the manner in which food reserves are released in India to get the maximum dampening effect on prices.

Increase the supply. Food prices will fall. Also, why the fuck are we letting rats eat food meant for the people?  

I basically drew some policy lessons from the logic of Cournot equilibrium.

Which is irrelevant. There is no duopoly in the food market.  

I was delighted that my suggestion was accepted, which, I now believe, I owe as much to Cournot’s excellent theorizing as to my not uttering the words “Cournot” or “equilibrium.” 

Because Manmohan or Montek or anybody with an Econ degree would say 'There is no fucking duopoly here you fucking cretin!'  

  One gets a fascinating glimpse of the interface between the world of economic ideas and political compulsions in developing countries from Arthur Lewis’s experience as Chief Economic Adviser to the Ghanaian Government.

No. The Ghanaian entrepreneurial class had made the mistake of recruiting Nkrumah who had even more degrees than the utterly useless Krishna Menon. They soon realized their mistake and got rid of that over-educated imbecile.  

He was invited to take this up by the country’s first Prime Minister and President, Kwame Nkrumah. The United Nations and the United States tried to block this on the ground that Lewis was

a fucking darkie. Back then the US still had Jim Crow. 

“not very sympathetic to the Bank [the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, commonly referred to as the World Bank]” (Tignor 2006, p. 147). There were also concerns, such as the one expressed by A. W. Snelling, an official in the British government, that “Lewis is a socialist, but a moderate one” (Tignor 2006, p. 148). 

Like Coase, his supervisor at the LSE was Arnold Plant. However, Lewis's elder brother- like some other brilliant West Indian lawyers and entrepreneurs- had settled in Ghana some twenty years previously. He was close to one of the leading Pan-Africanists of the period. 

  Lewis’s tenure began extremely well, with Nkrumah personally excited at the prospect of Lewis steering the Ghanaian economy to a takeoff. On taking office, Lewis plunged into work, especially related to the Second Five‐Year Plan, with widespread support from others in government. But soon Lewis’s idea of what constitutes good economics and Nkrumah’s insistence on political compulsions came into conflict. Seemingly small differences of opinion, for instance, whether to spray cocoa trees that had been attacked by capsid beetles (pardon me for having forgotten who took which side), became the cover for deeper conflict—the professional economist’s insistence on good economics, and the politician’s stubbornness about what is politically good.  

Lewis, like his brother, wanted an already prosperous country to rise up yet higher. Nkrumah wanted money for white elephant projects.  

Lewis left office at the end of 1958, with Nkrumah’s letter, gracious but recognizing that they could not work together, in his pocket: “The advice you have given me, sound though it may be, is essentially from the economic point of view, and I have told you on many occasions, that I cannot always follow this advice as I am a politician and must gamble on the future.” (Nkrumah to Lewis, December 18, 1958, quoted in Tignor 2006, p. 173)  

To be fair, many young people, at that time, thought Africa would rise very rapidly. Sadly, this meant letting its industrious peasants and artisans and entrepreneurs grow richer. This would also mean they would build beautiful new Churches and Mosques rather than worship Kali Marx in a proper fashion.  

  Interests and Ideas .  Some months after I moved from academe to the Indian government, a reporter asked me: what was the one thing that I had learned in this transition?

Manmohan has no power. He is a 'prone minister'. That was the answer the journalist was looking for.  

Unusually for a question of this kind, I had an answer. The reader may recall Keynes’s beautiful observation on the power of ideas, which ended with the following: “I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.”  

Unless those vested interests kill people who let ideas encroach upon them.  

As an academic, I loved the observation but did not believe in it, viewing it as a self‐serving remark of a professor.

Keynes held high positions in Government before becoming a Professor.  

It was only after I joined the Indian government and sat in interminable meetings with ministers and bureaucrats that I came to believe in Keynes’s observation.  

Everybody else believed that UPA did what the billionaires told it to- provided Madam Sonia's advisors could be squared.  

Ideas play an unbelievably important role, and so those in the business of ideas have a special responsibility. 

The one idea which took hold in India, while Basu was C.E.A, was that Modi and the Hindutvadis would do a better job running the country than a nice Italian lady pulling the strings of an elderly Sikh gentleman. But this was because Rahul was a moon-calf. 

 As a consequence, I view this conference and the book not just as an intellectual contribution, but as a critical ingredient for the work that is meant to be done in an organization such as the World Bank.  

Nobody else did. The World Bank has shit for brains.