Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Saw this funny video on YouTube about the ongoing bailouts in Europe in the form of a quiz. Questions included naming the countries being bailed out. The amounts involved. The countries doing the bailing out. The best question went something like this: Where were countries like Germany going to get the money to do a bailout if they were in not that a great shape themselves? Nobody seems to have an answer to that one. The other "bailers" like the US and Britain can print dollars and pounds. Germany, on the other hand, can not print its currency because the Euro can not be printed unilaterally by any member nation. So where exactly will Germany get the money from? Two options I can think of: the first is that the EU agrees to print more Euros. Seems unlikely given that it would drive inflation up all over the Euro zone. The second option is for Germany's debtors (like Greece) to eventually start paying them back. I wouldn't hold my breath on that happening. The video di

At a company training long back, a guest speaker said he didn’t believe that work-life balance was ever possible. He felt it was always a work-life choice. You could pick one or the other, not both. That was contrary to I had heard until then. And yet it felt true. We rarely feel that we gave both sides adequate time. Shouldn’t that be true of most others? Or did the others somehow do justice to both? And then I found the “evidence” to prove that speaker right: Spiderman. He misses on his dates with MJ because he is busy saving the world. All the other superheroes seem to be able to strike a perfect work-life balance! Not Spidy. He’s like most of us. He tries to do justice to both…but doesn’t succeed. If a superhero can’t pull it off, what chance do we mere mortals have?

Lots of people advocate openness, transparency and sharing in the context of ideas. Some take it too far, though, when they advocate that even algorithms should be available for everyone to see. Like when European regulators start pushing Google to open up its algorithm that ranks websites. The stakes are very high. For most of us, search is synonymous with Google. And few look beyond the first couple of results that Google throws up. Any lower and nobody even knows the site exists! If you own a bookstore or hotel and show up low down the list, it is disastrous for business. No wonder it is businesses that are pushing to open up Google’s algorithm. (Some of them complain they are ranked lower even though they are the most relevant result). It’s obvious why Google itself would be against the idea. After all, once the algorithm is public property, out goes Google’s monopoly. And its multi-billion dollar empire. Well, you might say, that’s just too bad for Google. But is there any other

Friedrich Hayek ’s acknowledgment speech for the first Nobel Prize in economics was titled “ The Pretense of Knowledge ”. In it, he condemned the increasing tendency of economists to use the scientific approach even though it made no sense in economics ! Yet economics was increasingly embracing that very approach. Why? Hayek felt that many economists craved for the respect accorded to the physical sciences. So they decided to do what the scientists did: base everything on measurements. Some economists even went so far as to say that economic theories should only consist of measurable parameters. That slowly degenerated into basing theories on what was available to be measured . If it couldn ’t be measured, ignore it. Better to be wrong with a scientific approach than right without one. Measurability trumped truth value! Qualitative knowledge was ignored; quantitative knowledge was king. But there are plenty of fields where measurements don’t convey much. Or anything at all. Areas

Gordon Gekko, made his (in)famous “Greed is Good” speech in the movie, Wall Street : “The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed-- for lack of a better word --is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms--greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge--has marked the upward surge of mankind.” That speech arouses disgust in many. And the recent financial crisis showed Hollywood did get it right when it came to Wall Street’s attitude. But take a look at that speech again. The parts about greed clarifying and cutting through are right. I don’t mean right as in morally correct. Rather, I mean right as in factually accurate. In fact, for those parts of the speech, “greed” isn’t the right word. If only Gekko hadn’t had the “ for lack of a better word ” problem… So what was the word Gekko was looking for? I’m guessing it would have meant greed minus the illegal, uneth