by Thomas O’Dwyer

In the new Apple TV series, The Foundation, based on the novels of Isaac Asimov, two mathematicians, an old man and a young woman, wrestle with the concept of psychohistory and what it means for the future of the Imperial Galaxy. Psychohistory combines history, sociology, and mathematical models to predict the future behaviour of very large groups of people. The girl, Gaal Dornick, generates a holographic model designed by her mentor Hari Seldon. She sees a swarm of particles representing trillions of people forming patterns of growth and decay across thousands of millennia, predicting the looming collapse of civilisation. It seems the grand ideas of the classic science fiction writers are back among us after decades of wandering lost in the intellectual deserts of Hollywood, where the clash of alien cultures often became thin remakes of American cowboy and Injun battles of yore. The intelligent swarm of equations in Foundation immediately brought to mind the restless, mysterious, sentient ocean of the planet Solaris in the novel by the Polish author, Stanislaw Lem. The Polish parliament has officially declared 2021 to be Stanislaw Lem Year in honour of its native genius, 100 years after his birth. Read more »

I’ve been buying and trying out some new hot sauces recently, in this case with my lunch of khichri (red lentils and rice cooked together) and a chicken seekh kabab. Here are my brief ratings of these fiery condiments (from the left) on a scale of 1 to 5 stars:

• El Yucateco Habanero Black Reserve: ★★★, not much flavor, lot of heat.
• La Meridana Mango Habanero: ★★★★, nice combo of sweet mango flavor and heat.
• El Yucateco Chipotle: ★★★★★, tastes like a hot tamarind chutney, v. good.
• Cholula Chipotle: ★★, too watery, not enough flavor or heat.
• Clemente Jacques Chipotles Molidos: ★★★★, excellent and second only to freshly blended chipotle peppers in adobe sauce.

by Mindy Clegg

It’s the beginning of fall and the Halloween season! As we’re still somewhat locked down (though we should be MORE locked down, if you ask me), why not a recommendation for a horror film that addresses some aspect of modern history? In this case, the Bosnian War. Humans have long loved to be scared. Mythologies from around the world include elements of horror, showing how it seems to be a universal aspect of storytelling as scholars who study folklore and mythology have shown, such as Emily Zarka of the PBS show Monstrum.

But why do we still embrace being scared for an hour and a half despite being fully modern subjects in a more “enlightened” era? Kath Bates argued that humans seek out these thrills because they are scares that we can control. Writer and artist Merrie Destefano gave a more comprehensive set of reasons for our modern embrace of the macabre including proving to ourselves that we can overcome our fears. I would add that horror stories can help us to come to terms with horrific events in the the past that seem to defy our understanding of civilization. Put differently, horror as a film genre can help make the horrific in human history accessible for those outside of particular experiences. One example is The Maus, a horror film set in the woods near Srebrenica. Read more »

by Rafiq Kathwari

After the Twin Towers fell, the media flagged the attack, 9/11, a forever label that is historically significant for yet another attack, an inside job premeditated by Dr Kissangel and his oxymorons to depose Senor Yen Day, a dreamer, who wished for his people, at the very least, a ruka to sleep in, a lunch of cazuela and pan amasado, a good education, plus vision hearing and dental.

“I’m a socialist, not a utopian,” Senor Yen Day said in his homeland shaped like an extra-long red chili hugging the Pacific. He sincerely believed his dream had a hot chance.

Dr Kissangel didn’t want the wasps buzzing in their manicured lawns from sea to sullied sea to learn that the dream dreamed by Senor Yen Day would work much better in the long run than the grind the wasps had been told was the most productive of all grinds in the world’s most powerful demoncrazy.

Dr. Kissangel gathered his most trusted oxzines, nine men and two women, in a dimly lit war room at a building shaped like a pentagon near the Potomac River. He stood on a pulpit in front of a backlit bright map of the world. Many oxzines lit their cigars, swiveling behind a serpentine-shaped veneered countertop that snaked from one end of the room to the other. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

All of the articles in this series can be found here.

At age twenty-three, after a brief stint of teaching at Calcutta University, I, accompanied by Kalpana, proceeded to Britain on a Commonwealth Scholarship. The Scholars from different parts of India were asked to assemble in Delhi, from where we were to take the international flight. The only experience I had of an air flight before was when I flew from Kolkata to Guwahati, representing Calcutta University in an inter-University debating competition. That flight experience had not been good, as our propeller-driven Dakota plane had hit a supposed ‘air pocket’. So I had some unnecessary trepidation for the long Delhi-London flight.

A few months before I went to Delhi Jagdish Bhagwati, already a star economist, had written an article in EW advocating the case for devaluation of the Indian rupee, to which I wrote a kind of counter, arguing for a more general policy. When Jagdish read it in EW, he enquired with Sachin Chaudhuri who I was. I got a message from Chaudhuri that as I was soon to be in Delhi, Jagdish wanted to see me there. In Delhi he (and his colleague and partner, Padma Desai) took me to Delhi School of Economics. This was a good opportunity for me to know Jagdish particularly as his expertise was in International Trade Theory, an area I was planning to specialize in, and Jagdish gave me appropriate encouragement. I also met there K.N.Raj (more on him later), the doyen of Indian economists at that time—many years later when Samuelson at MIT challenged me if I knew any low-caste Indian economist, after a frantic mental search Raj’s name came handy. Read more »

by Paul Braterman

We all know the story. Socrates has been told by the oracle that he is wisest of men, but he considers that he himself knows nothing. Puzzled, he takes to cross-examining his fellow Athenians about their beliefs, and time and again finds that they will not bear examination. As a result, he is indicted on trumped-up charges of impiety and corrupting the young. After a trial in which he eloquently defends his behaviour, he is condemned to death. A martyr to freedom of expression, and a shocking example of democracy suppressing dissent. Surely there is more to the story than that? Indeed there is.

I am not about to commit the folly of denying the greatness of Socrates. We still, twentyfour cenuries later, praise his methods of investigation. I myself have used an argument taken directly from one of Plato’s Socratic dialogues. The topic was practical ethics, Socrates’ speciality; and the technique used, questioning assumed certainties, his favourite tactic.

Here’s what happened. A few years ago, I was involved in a moderately successful campaign  [1] to reduce the statutory role of the Churches in Scotland’s local authority education committees. The Church of Scotland attempted to justify its privileged position by pointing to its distinctive Christian ethos. In reply, I pointed out that to the extent that this ethos is generally shared, we do not need any Church to promote it, while to the extent that it is specific to Christianity, the Churches have no right to impose it on the rest of us.

My reasoning derives directly from Socrates, in The Euthyphro, where Socrates challenges Euthyphro to define pious behaviour. Read more »

by Raji Jayaraman

The gender wage gap is a well-documented phenomenon. Many are familiar with the claim that women earn 80 cents on the dollar. A more precise statement would be something like, “In the U.S., according to 2019 CPS data, the ratio of women’s to men’s median earnings for full-time, year-round workers, aged 15 years and older, was 82 cents.” Of course, the precise number of cents to the dollar will vary depending on the year of observation; whether you’re looking at median or mean earnings; what your age cut offs are; and whether you’re including full- and part-time workers. But 80 cents to the dollar is memorable, and it’s not dramatically the mark for many wealthy countries in the Global North. According to Eurostat, the average gender earnings ratio across EU-27 countries is 86 cents; in Canada it is 87 cents. And it’s been stuck somewhere in the eighties for two decades now.

All of this has led to a demand for “Equal pay for equal work,” which is something all reasonable people can rally behind. Governments have thrown considerable policy weight behind this idea for some time now. Equal pay for equal work is a founding principle of the EU. The United States Equal Pay Act prohibiting gender-based pay discrimination was introduced in 1963. Such legislation has been complemented by laws mandating pay transparency by requiring companies to publish data on their gender pay gap—the idea being that that pay secrecy perpetuates gender-based pay discrimination (for example, here and here, with some evidence that such legislation may have narrowed the gap a bit.)

As a woman in economics, I am painfully aware that there exists gender-based discrimination at work (feel my pain here and here). There is even evidence that the same person tends to get lower pay for the same job if he is a she.  That’s unacceptable. Equal pay for equal work! The trouble is that most work is not equal. Work is deeply segregated along gender lines. The problem starts early on. Read more »

Uuriintuya Dagvasambuu. Aabam Beebem, 2019.

Acrylic on canvas.

More here and here.

by Joseph Shieber

One of the pleasures of reading Amartya Sen’s new memoir, Home in the World, is stumbling upon little anecdotes that provide new perspectives on, or an opportunity for a deepening engagement with, major intellectual figures.

One such occasion for me was Sen’s discussion of the influence of the economist Piero Sraffa, one of Sen’s academic mentors at Cambridge in the 1950s, on the later thought of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

That Sraffa was influential on Wittgenstein is undeniable. In his preface to the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein describes the path that led him to repudiate his earlier philosophical positions, as elucidated in his first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and to arrive at the positions that he develops in the Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein notes that, “since beginning to occupy myself with philosophy again, sixteen years ago, I have been forced to recognize grave mistakes in what I wrote in that first book. I was helped to realize these mistakes—to a degree which I myself am hardly able to estimate—by the criticism which my ideas encountered from Frank Ramsey … . Even more than to this … criticism I am indebted to that which a teacher of this university, Mr. P. Sraffa, for many years unceasingly practised on my thoughts. I am indebted to this stimulus for the most consequential ideas of this book.” (Philosophical Investigations, viii)

Though Wittgenstein doesn’t elaborate on the nature of Sraffa’s contributions, Sen locates Sraffa’s influence on Wittgenstein in Sraffa’s insistence that Wittgenstein’s earlier reductionist theory of meaning (more specifically, the picture theory of meaning of the Tractatus) was inadequate to capture the complexities of human language use. Sraffa emphasized the complex social arrangements that sustained and gave meaning to language, social arrangements that Wittgenstein attempted to capture with his notion of “language games” in the Philosophical Investigations. Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

Suppose that we could all be good for just one day. No one would be tempted away from doing the right thing and towards their own selfish interests or illicit urges. No one would be afraid of retribution. We would be free of all internal and external obstacles to being good. What would happen?

Some good things would happen and would last beyond one day. For example, dictatorships would collapse into rubble. If no one would do evil or allow evil to be done for just one day then the thugs would stay home (or join in) while the people took back their country.

Some other nice things might get done. People might take the day off work and spend it doing good deeds like picking up the garbage in their neighbourhood. This wouldn’t last since the effects of those deeds wouldn’t last (it is easier to dismantle something evil and build something good). But even in their own right these good deeds probably wouldn’t amount to very much. This is not only because there is only so much that can be done in one day, but also because most important things require cooperation and coordination to achieve. We wouldn’t know which of the many possible good things to try to do, in what order, or to what extent. Should we give our life savings to Oxfam? Should we go adopt a cat from the shelter? Should we volunteer to teach English to recent immigrants? Where should we start and when should we stop? Merely acting on the intention to be good is not enough to actually do much good. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Dick Edelstein

Hello, my name is David Coronado. The grave where your grandfather is buried is being exhumed. I think you can come to collect his remains and say a proper goodbye to him.

The above quote from a recent article in the Spanish newspaper El País illustrates how David Coronado approached relatives of people executed in 1940 by the forces of General Franco’s regime. The bodies of their family members had been buried in a common grave in Paterna, a townland near Valencia. Coronado was working with the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (ARMH), an NGO founded by journalist Emilio Silva following the exhumation in the year 2000 of a common grave containing the bodies of thirteen Republicans. Silva’s grandfather was one of those buried in the grave, and relatives of other victims asked him to help them recover the remains of their loved ones. Thus, Spain joined the vanguard of the current movement for the recovery of historical memory, a worldwide movement whose general aims have become a topical issue during the past two decades.

A longtime Spanish friend, Concha Catalan, told me her family’s Civil War story:

My family experienced trauma too. My grandfather was imprisoned by both sides during the Civil War. After the war, he was sent by the regime to various prisons and later to one of General Franco’s colonias militarizadas penitenciarias [penal colonies], where he worked as an engineer directing a crew of fellow prisoners forcibly assigned to public works tasks. His absence and suffering had a lasting effect on my family.

Concha is one of the founders of Innovation & Human Rights, a Spanish NGO that focuses its efforts on facilitating public access to archival data relating to Civil War casualties and victims of reprisal. Concha, who had worked and trained as an investigative journalist, met co-founder Guillermo Blasco at a hackathon in Barcelona, an event that brought together journalists and computer experts to share skills and resources and develop solutions to specific problems involving data and information technology. Blasco, a proficient coder, took an interest Concha’s work as an open data activist in the field of human rights, and their subsequent collaboration resulted in the founding of Innovation & Human Rights. Read more »

Photo from a few days ago of the moonrise above Plose in Brixen, South Tyrol, and a streetlamp near me which looks like a sunrise.

by Derek Neal

According to the website Rotten Tomatoes, there are four types of movies: good-good movies, good-bad movies, bad-good movies, and bad-bad movies. These types can be identified using the Rotten Tomatoes score for each movie, particularly the relationship between the critics’ score and the audience’s score. Let me explain. Rotten Tomatoes is a website that collects movie reviews and assigns them a rating of either “fresh” (if the review is positive) or “rotten” (if the review is negative). It then calculates the percentage of fresh reviews and assigns this as a score to the movie. If the score is 60% or greater, the film itself is considered fresh, whereas if the score is lower than 60%, the film is rotten. This is a useful way of rating a movie, but there’s a problem here, too. Let’s imagine every reviewer gives a movie three out of four stars, indicating a good film but not a great one. These reviews would all be classified as fresh, and the film would receive a misleadingly high score of 100% (The Terminator has a 100% rating, for example, while The Godfather does not). Let’s imagine another film receives all two out of four-star reviews. These would be classified as rotten, and the film would receive a rating of 0%, indicating one of the worst movies of all time. But the movie wouldn’t really be that bad.

In addition to the critics’ score, there is also the audience’s score, which simply calculates the ratings of the website’s users to decide whether a movie is fresh or rotten. This is based on hundreds to thousands of reviews as opposed to the 40 or 50 that make up the critics’ score, and in its relationship to the critics’ score it can give us valuable insight into the characteristics of a movie. Read more »

by Alexander C. Kafka

Is loneliness a choice? Is love?

Such timeless questions resonate particularly a year and a half into the coronavirus pandemic as we continue to weigh the risks and rewards of companionship, of intimacy, and calculate our capacity for solitude. Those quandaries propel the bittersweet romantic, sometimes droll meditation I’m Your Man, a new German film directed by Maria Schrader from a script she wrote with Jan Schomberg off a short story by Emma Braslavsky.

Alma (Marren Eggert) is an anthropologist pressured into participating in an evaluation of humanoid, robotic, made-to-order mates. Hers is a dapper, dignified database named Tom (Dan Stevens), who can rumba, recite Rilke, or cite a just-published journal article written by Brazilian cuneiform experts. Alma’s tastes, atop the crowd-sourced desires of millions of other women, dictate his algorithms, which are fine-tuned as he interacts with her. Out of the box, he comes on a little strong. “You’re a very beautiful woman, Alma,” he says upon first meeting her. “Your eyes are like two mountain lakes I could sink into.” But he’s a quick study and soon tones it down. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

All of the articles in this series can be found here.

Presidency College had a good Department of Economics and Political Science. I’d say that the teaching standard at my time there would compare quite favorably with the standard I found later when teaching undergraduate classes in Berkeley. I remember in my first lecture in Berkeley in a large undergraduate class I was using some bit of calculus. After my class a female student came to see me to complain about the use of calculus in class. I told her that I was not using any advanced calculus, so if she brushed up her high school-level calculus she should have no difficulty in following the class. She said that in her high school in Carmel, a California coastal town, there was the option to take either calculus or yoga, and she had chosen the latter. I told her, unhelpfully, that this was a choice unheard-of in the land of yoga, India, and, I thought to myself, certainly in Presidency College.

One outstanding teacher I had there was Bhabatosh Datta. I can say that if I have to count four or five best Economics teachers anywhere in the world, I’d include him in the list. He not merely had an excellent expository style, more importantly he inspired us, even as undergraduates, to aspire to reach the frontier of the subject. I remember once rushing to the Library to take out a front-ranking research journal (Quarterly Journal of Economics) to read up some new article that he referred to in class. This is somewhat rare at the undergraduate level in most parts of the world. Of course, I did not understand half the article without taking his help. As the poet Robert Browning said, a man’s reach should exceed his grasp; by pushing us this way Datta wanted to see us achieve more. Read more »