Today I will be giving a ‘Special Lecture” on “Who Gets What in the World?” in honour of the 125th birth anniversary of P.C. Mahalanobis at the Indian Statistical Institute in Bangalore (announcement here) based on analyses from the Global Consumption and Income Project. All are welcome. The slides can be downloaded here.
This July and August, I led an international group of experts in preparing an Economic Report on the role of the BRICS countries (Brazil, China, India, Russia and South Africa) in the world economy and international development. The Report was commissioned as an input to the Summit of BRICS countries that took place in early … More The BRICS and a Changing World
In recent years there has developed a branch of economics which seeks to apply statistical physics approaches to understanding economic problems. Some years ago, my colleague at the New School, Anwar Shaikh, introduced me to the pioneering work in this area that seeks to understand income distributions, for example by the physicist Y M Yakovenko. … More Statistical Physics and the Social Sciences: What Potential Contribution?
Must those who value liberty accept that its consequences include economic inequality? In the tradition associated with John Locke, of which a modern representative was Robert Nozick, the answer is yes. Akeel Bilgrami, Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, argues no, because in his view liberty properly understood and exercised, can be made consistent with … More Equality and Liberty: Beyond a Boundary
I was privileged recently to spend a little time in The Gambia, whose people recently overthrew a megalomaniacal, authoritarian and in many respects vicious President, Yahyeh Jammeh, in an extraordinary democratic moment, due to their courage and the timely supportive action of other countries in West Africa (and very little if at all due to support … More An Economic Strategy for The Gambia?
I was struck some years ago when I read John Dawson’s biography of the towering logician Kurt Gödel, Logical Dilemmas, of the story of his ‘proof’ that the US could be turned ‘legally’ from a democracy into a dictatorship, and the anxiety of his friends Oskar Morgenstern and Albert Einstein that his eagerness to tell others … More Gödel and Trump
Yesterday at the United Nations I spoke at a panel on addressing global poverty organized by the Club de Madrid, a group of former democratically-elected world leaders, which has in recent years championed a concept which they refer to as that of a ‘Shared Society’. The title of the concept was recently adopted, to some … More What is a Shared Society?
In the months before Donald Trump’s despicable executive order at least temporarily banning entrants to the United States from select majority Muslim countries and similarly placing a stop on all refugee admissions, among other measures, was promulgated, many commentators have attempted to find the words to capture the smallness of mind and of moral vision of the new … More Trump’s Travel Ban: Dangerous Inflection Point
The shocking event that is the rise of trumpism has been by now analyzed widely. Most focus on the appeal of Donald Trump to those in the United States who for one another reason or another feel left behind, wish to retrieve an earlier, lost, social order, and rebuke establishment politicians who they feel do … More ‘Social Science’: Trumpism’s Collateral Damage
See here as well as below my piece on the Modi government’s move to scrap high-denomination currency notes in India: The Government of India’s decision to abolish high denomination notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 has been given two primary rationales. The first is to address a problem of counterfeiting, suggested to emanate from across the … More Is Modi’s move to scrap high-denomination notes more about politics than economics?
reddytoread 