Monthly Archives: October 2014
Should the Fed tackle Income Inequality?
That is the question, the daily NYT trollfest, also known as Room for Debate, addressed yesterday. The Fed has two mandates, keeping the inflation in check and decreasing unemployment. Unfortunately for us, since the late 70s the Fed has taken its inflation mandate far more seriously than the unemployment one. Since inflation has not been a serious problem since the 70s, it is high time that the Fed addressed its neglected mandate. Doing so would go a long way in addressing the income inequality issue.
Our economy is consumer driven, so rising income equality shrinks the economy, because people have to spend most of their income on necessities, leaving little for anything else. Fed’s investor driven policies haven’t been particularly beneficial to the wellbeing of the average consumer. The rising tide hasn’t lifted all the boats, as promised.
Of all the respondents, I found Joseph Stiglitz’s answer most pertinent while Michael Strain,strained my credulity. According to Strain, Fed should not address inequality because it is a partisan issue. At least, he is honest, one party does not want to address issues that concern the 99%.
Well, who are you going to believe, a Nobel Laureate in economics or the resident scholar, at the American Enterprise Institute? One who David Brooks approvingly quotes and has zero publications or citations in Google Scholar, that I could find.
Your thoughts?
You has questions; Econ Cat has answers
By two_kittehs
Pankaj Mishra has Lost the Plot
In addition to the regular side of bullshit that is a David Brooks column, there was a special dose of crazy in last Saturday’s opinion section of the New York Times. A highbrow word salad from none other than Pompous Pankaj Mishra. In case you didn’t read it, let me briefly paraphrase Mishra. Shorter Mishra, India is worse than ISIS and also Russia and Imperial Japan. He did not say whether it is worse than the Ebola virus, perhaps that is the subject of the next essay.
He starts with a kernel of truth but his conclusions, sound like projection. Kernel of truth: Narendra Modi’s ascent to the most important political office in India is troubling especially in light of the riots that took place during his tenure as the chief minister of Gujarat. This to Mishra is proof enough of the malevolence of the Indian electorate in general and the Indian diaspora in particular.
Mishra begins by quoting the father of pompous intellectuals of Indian heritage, V. S. Naipaul. According to both Naipaul and Mishra, upper caste Indians are an intellectually insecure lot, not something I necessarily disagree with but I think the brush strokes of this painting are too broad for my liking. After all, this description could easily fit both Mishra and Naipaul, who are as upper caste as they come.
First he paraphrases Naipaul, then goes on to give us his own pearls of wisdom;
These well-born Indians betrayed a craze for “phoren” consumer goods and approval from the West, as well as a self-important paranoia about the “foreign hand.” “Without the foreign chit,” Mr. Naipaul concluded, “Indians can have no confirmation of their own reality.”
Today a new generation of Indian nationalists lurches between victimhood and chauvinism, and with ominous implications. As the country appears to rise (and simultaneously fall), many ambitious members of a greatly expanded and fully global Hindu middle class feel frustrated in their demand for higher status from white Westerners.
What does fully global Hindu middle class, mean anyway? Has Mishra been hanging out with the same cab driver who ferries Tom Friedman? Mishra, then goes on to quote several Modi acolytes. He then asserts that their ridiculous theories of Hindu supremacy are representative of the Indian elite. Who qualifies as elite in Mishra’s eyes, I wonder? What about the person he sees in the mirror, everyday?
Mishra is assuming that Narendra Modi, despite all his talk of moderation, is going to put the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)’s exclusionary ideology of India as a Hindu nation, in practice, and that this is a popular sentiment in India. This claim, is not borne out by India’s history both pre and post independence. The Sangh and its ideology are nothing new. Hindutva has been around for almost a hundred years. Plenty of time for this ideology to have become mainstream, won’t you say? Before Mr. Modi there has been only one time when a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) politician has headed the central government in Delhi, that was Mr. Atal Bihari Vajapayee, who led the coalition government in the late nineties. While it is true that RSS is the dog that wags the BJP tail, both Modi and Vajpayee before him have sought to minimize their RSS connections. Precisely, because RSS and their ideology is neither mainstream nor popular in India today or has been at any other time since the inception of RSS.
Mid column, Mishra’s goes off on a weird tangent, in what almost seems like a part of another essay where he compares India to Russia and Imperial Japan. Evidence please, to support this pseudo intellectual word salad.
These wounds were caused, and are deepened, by failed attempts to match Western power through both mimicry and collaboration (though zealously anti-Western, Chinese nationalism has developed much more autonomously in comparison). Largely subterranean until it erupts, this ressentiment of the West among thwarted elites can assume a more treacherous form than the simple hatred and rejectionism of outfits such as Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Taliban. The intellectual history of right-wing Russian and Japanese nationalism reveals an ominously similar pattern as the vengeful nativism of Hindu nationalists: a recoil from craving Western approval into promoting religious-racial supremacy.
The Russian elite, created by the hectic Westernizing ventures of Peter the Great, was the first to articulate the widespread sense of inadequacy and failure created in societies trying to catch up with the modern West. In 1836, Pyotr Chaadaev argued in “First Philosophical Letter” that, “We belong neither to the West nor to the East, and we possess the traditions of neither.” His eloquent self-pity, which shook up Pushkin as well as Gogol and Tolstoy, inaugurated the semi-Westernized Russian elite’s tormented search for a native identity to uphold against the West.
Where Mishra completely lost me in this unedited rant about Indians and their nationalism was the fact that he wrote approvingly of China’s “non-western” nationalism. After four paragraphs on this strange trajectory, Mishra suddenly remembers the essay he started writing and goes on to bash his favorite bugbear, the half-baked or semi westernized (his words) Indian;
The fantasies of racial-religious revenge and redemption that breed in Western suburbs as well as posh Indian enclaves today speak of a vast spiritual desolation as well as a deepening intellectual crisis. Even Mr. Naipaul briefly succumbed to the pathology of mimic machismo he had despised (and, later, also identified among chauvinists in Muslim countries). He hailed the vandalizing by a Hindu mob of the Babri Masjid mosque in 1992, which triggered nationwide massacres of Muslims, as the sign of an overdue national “awakening.”
Naipaul who Mishra approvingly quotes in the beginning may be of Indian heritage, but he has never been an Indian citizen. To claim that his opinions are representative is ridiculous, as is the claim that the self selected group of people of Indian heritage who showed up last month to see Modi are representative of the Indian diaspora.
There are many more such nonresident Indians in the West today, vicariously living history’s violent drama in their restless exile: In Madison Square Garden, in New York, last month, more than 19,000 people cheered Mr. Modi’s speech about ending India’s millennium-long slavery. But hundreds of millions of uprooted Indians are also now fully exposed to demagoguery. In an unprecedented public intervention this month, the present chief of the R.S.S., who wants all Indian citizens to identify themselves as Hindus since India is a “Hindu nation,” appeared on state television to rant against Muslim infiltrators and appeal for a boycott of Chinese goods.
Such crude xenophobia, now officially sanctioned in Mr. Modi’s India, seems only slightly less menacing than the previous R.S.S. chief’s wishful thinking about one more Mahabharata against demonic anti-Hindus. Japan’s expansionist gambles in China and the Pacific in the last century and, more recently, Russia’s irredentism in Ukraine show that a mainstreamed rhetoric of national aggrandizement can quickly slide into reckless warmongering. Certainly, the ruling classes of wannabe superpowers have spawned a complex force: the ideology of anti-imperialist imperialism, which, forming an axis with the modern state and media and nuclear technology, can make Islamic fundamentalists seem toothless. One can only hope that India’s democratic institutions are strong enough to constrain yet another wounded elite from breaking out for geopolitical and military manhood.
Is Mishra projecting when speaks about these so called semi-western Indians who supposedly worry about what white westerners say about them?
As for anti-western rhetoric, it has always been a part of Indian politics, both on the left and right, especially before independence and immediately afterwards. Given India’s experience with British rule, this is not surprising. In fact Swadeshi, or buying goods made in India was a major weapon in the struggle for independence both under Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Mohandas Gandhi, both leaders of the Congress in British India and upper caste Indian elite to boot.
Indian leaders starting with Jawaharlal Nehru saw the post war American rise in global politics a continuation of British hegemony pre WWII. It is precisely why India allied itself with the Soviets during the Cold War. A decision made by center-left Congress Party not the BJP or its predecessor, the Jan Sangh. So I don’t think that the anti-west rhetoric of some of Modi’s supporters means what Mishra thinks it means.
Even if the Indian elite who Mishra despises is every bit as craven as his assertions, Indian democracy is not as fragile as he fears, it has survived and thrived for over sixty years, and has held free and fair elections to determine its leaders since its independence in 1947. Not something one can say either about Russia or Imperial Japan or Mishra’s favorite, China. Indian democracy has survived among other things, Prime minister Indira Gandhi’s attempt to usurp power in 1975 after a stinging electoral defeat and the assassinations of two of its Prime Ministers (Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi). Yes the Indian democracy has its flaws, which democracy doesn’t? India’s elected leaders have been all too human with feet of clay, and let down the people who elected them. As for the diaspora, Indian Constitution does not allow for a dual citizenship and there are no absentee ballots, so most of those Modi followers in NYC either can’t or won’t be able to vote in the Indian elections. So even if they are all, as rabid as Mishra claims, they have no franchise in India’s electoral politics.
Indian voters showed the earlier government lead by BJP the door, when they realized that BJP’s India shining campaign was all sizzle and no steak. If Modi starts unnecessary wars and does not deliver on his economic agenda, he won’t last beyond one term. Yes, Narendra Modi’s Sangh antecedents and his performance during the Godhra riots, as well, are a cause for concern but there is no reason to believe that a majority of India’s citizenry, even among those who voted for the BJP has drunk the RSS Kool-aid. I need more evidence than the ranting of a few reactionaries to hit the panic button. I have more faith in the pragmatism of the Indian electorate than the blathering of either Mishra or the current RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat.
Happy Diwali
Kandeel (source: Wikipedia)
Diwali is a time for new beginnings, a reboot if you will, before winter finally arrives. It celebrated like most winter festivities, with lots of illumination for your home and lots of calorific but tasty foods for your body. Diwali is among the many festivals celebrated just around the time when we all need something bright and cheerful to take our attention off the onset of a long and dreary winter.
Diwali is also a time of new beginnings, time to start new ventures and wear new clothes. To mark the occasion, I am wearing my new sweater. I will also be making karanjis (turnovers with a coconut filling) and chivda (trail mix with nuts and other crunchy stuff), later this evening and putting up Christmas lights in my windows, and may be carving a Jack’ O Lantern or two, in place of a kandeel (paper lantern).
Diwali is celebrated over several days and the festivities start on the fourteenth day of the month of Kartik, in the Hindu lunar calendar. Besides the new clothes, another highlight entails exchange of gifts of snacks especially made for Diwali. How will you be celebrating the Festival of Lights?
Penny Wise and Pound Foolish
The current woes of the Secret Service may be related to the sequestration cuts that went into effect when austerity cat ruled Washington. do budget cuts in the Secret Service when the current occupant has been getting at least three times more death threats makes sense? They do, if your goal is to drown the Federal Government in a bathtub and you don’t particularly like the current occupant of the White House. Of course, there are those in Congress who are denying the obvious cause and effect relationship.
I wonder what other effects is the continuing sequestration having on other government agencies and the continuing effects of sequestration on science. Particularly, the harm done to the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, and other government funded research. Scientific and technological edge is what made this country what it is, so killing basic research for tax cuts, makes little sense. It is akin to eating your seed corn. There usually is no immediate economic payoff from basic research, so if government doesn’t do it, business is not going to step in and make up the difference.
How many scientific careers have been put on hold because of these cuts? If you have been directly affected by the budget cuts due to sequestration, please share them in the comments. Thanks!
ETA: You can also e-mail me your stories at manyworldsonecat@gmail.com.
Is working without toona and nip because of budget cuts
By two_kittehs
Schroedinger's Cat 