Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In response to my blog on how George Soros made a billion in a day , my dad had posted his comment including the following line: “Economics is too much for me! I find even the most advanced physics a lot easier!!” My dad must be the rare person from the physics domain to say that. Sheldon's (of The Big Bang Theory TV series fame) response when asked by Penny if he knows economics is representative of how most physicists talk about other fields: “I'm a physicist. I have a working knowledge of the entire universe and everything it contains.” Hell, there's even an interdisciplinary research field called econophysics ! The term was coined by Eugene Stanley, to describe the large number of papers written by physicists in the problems of (stock and other) markets. You can imagine how deeply physics has tried to “infiltrate” economics by the fact that there are even terms like classical economy, quantum economy and quantum finance! (But before you get too carried away...

There are many like Gopalkrishna Gandhi who cry foul that the BJP managed to win an absolute majority of seats with just 31% of the vote. In the age of data and the Internet, you will surely find someone who crunches the numbers differently. Like R. Jagannathan . He reminds us that the BJP fought as part of an alliance, which means that it didn’t contest all 545 seats. In fact, it only contested 428 seats on its own. Raju Limbachiya says that the vote share of the BJP in those 428 seats it contested is 40%. Or if you see the vote share of the NDA, it comes to 38.2%. Jagannathan provides context for these numbers: “In multi-party systems in the west no party usually crosses a 40 percent vote share; as for the gold standard of mandates – a 50-percent-plus vote – it happens only in two-party races.” In any case, as Jay Mazoomdaar says : “It is one thing to oppose the politics of Modi-led BJP; quite another to question its decisive mandate…(as is being done by the) many o...

When one of my colleagues in China resigned, he sent his personal mail id to keep in touch. It read something like this: xxx@163.com (I felt it was a bit weird that a site had only numbers on it but I didn’t give it any further thought). When I Google’d a bit though, I was surprised to find that it is, in fact, very common for Chinese sites to have only numbers! Christopher Beam gives many such examples : “For example, the massive online retailer Jingdong Mall is at jd.com or, if that takes too long to type, 3.cn. Check out 4399.com to see one of China’s first and largest online gaming websites. Buy and sell used cars at 92.com. Want to purchase train tickets? It’s as easy as 12306.cn.” This seems insane. Wouldn’t it be much harder, if not impossible, to remember so many numbers, I wondered? Why would anyone choose numbers instead of letters for their website? Beam found the answer, and it makes perfect sense once you hear it: “To a native English-speaker, remembering ...

There is a sea of orange in the map below, indicating the seats the BJP won in the just concluded elections: A lot of people were curious as to the vote share of the BJP nation-wide. Did they win a proportional number of votes? Or did they just get votes in places they won and did not have any “wasted” votes? (Here, a “wasted” vote is one cast in an electoral district where the party did not win). Equally, was the return of a single party majority a sign of the end of regional parties, at least at the national level? Was this the beginning of the move to a two party system? Good questions. Surprisingly, the first answer I saw to these questions was in the Washington Post by a non-Indian guy named Adam Ziegfeld ! So what are the answers? The BJP’s vote share this time was just 31%. In contrast, the Congress despite getting decimated got 19%. It was the distribution of votes that mattered: the BJP hardly had any “wasted” votes. To understand how “useful” every BJP vote w...

Becoming a billionaire is not all that uncommon. We know it can be done over decades. Or even just a few years, as happens so often in Silicon Valley. But I doubt anyone will ever beat George Soros’ time of doing it in a single day! Well ok, the build up to the event took time. But Soros’ net worth moved from way below a billion to more than a billion on a single day. And in the process, the man broke the British Pound and brought the Bank of England to its knees. Here’s the story as told by Rohin Dhar . But first, the backdrop. In 1979, the European Exchange Rate mechanism (ERM) was created “to fix their exchange rates with each other instead of “floating” their currency and letting capital markets set the rates”. But of course, one can’t just “set it and forget it”. As trade happens, market forces will put pressure that currencies increase or decrease in value. So the government needs to intervene, in one of two ways: 1)       Buy or sell its own ...

In the end, the exit polls were wrong: It wasn't the NDA that scraped past the half way mark, it was the BJP that single handedly got the majority! The absolute majority has robbed the media of the usual next stage of an election: who will align with whom? What will they demand in return? What impact will it have on a cohesive agenda to govern? All moot points now. We don't need to suffer your blackmail tactics, amma and didi . To those who bemoan the rise of the “communal” leader, Harsh Pant has the answer : “(Narendar) Modi is a product of contemporary India, where the secular versus communal binary, while important, is no longer the be all and end all of politics.” Besides, let's face it: we have had a communal party in power for most of the period since 1984 anyway: the Congress killed 3000 Sikhs in 1984. While Bal Thackeray made the remote control model of governance (in)famous at a state level, madam and baba took it to the next level, the national leve...

As transportation and communication technologies got better, faster and cheaper, where you were seemed to matter less and less. And with the Internet, many felt that geography (location) was history. Check out this chart on global inequality over the last century or so: Dylan Matthews explains the chart: “[C]lass rank matters far less than location in determining where someone falls in the global income distribution. That’s a big change from the 19th century, where class rank predominated. [Branko Milanovic, the lead economist at the World Bank’s research group] argues this means we live in a “non-Marxian world,” where the relevant cleavage is not between the proletariat and the owners of capital but between those with the misfortune to be born in poor countries and those with the great fortune not to be. “A proper analysis of global inequality today requires an empirical and mental shift from concerns with class to concerns with location,” he writes. “In other words, a m...

In a recent blog , I had written about the pain of URL’s as the way to surf the Web. Turns out the URL may be a necessary evil after all! Allen Pike explains why : “I realize that URLs are ugly to look at, hard to remember, and a nightmare for security. Still, they are the entire point of the web.” Why? Let John Gruber explain : “The web has always been a nebulous concept, but at its center is the idea that everything can be linked.” And so, Pike reminds us: “The term “web” is no accident – it refers to this (linking) explicitly.” Given that definition of the Web, imagine how you would link to an article without a URL: would a Google search always get you to the exact same article? And as long as the answer to the above question is No, as Pike says: “Unlike other modern technologies that have hidden as much complexity as possible, web browsers have continued to put this technical artifact top center, dots, slashes and all. The noble URL caused a revolution in shar...

On the Net, links have been the way to reference for a long time. Nicholson Baker added a YouTube URL in his (physical) book but then wondered whether the link mechanism could be improved : “Well, I really want people to listen to Stephen Fearing…And of course the worst possible way to tell them to go, I guess, is to give them a dead YouTube link, because they’re going to make a typo…So I kind of blew it.” Alan Jacobs took that point and narrated a brief history of the URL . Explaining that a URL is a proxy to the IP address of the site, he said: “For human beings, the former is easier to remember than the latter.” But then as websites exploded, Jacobs points out that the URL’s got too long to remember. Jacobs agrees that this may not be an issue because: “And anyway, within the last decade more and more people have been giving up on even a basic understanding of URLs, trusting Google results instead. Google’s highlighted blue links — in your own language! — offer a layer...

A while back, I wrote about the Internet currency, the Bitcoin . This blog is a deeper exploration of what money is. I read this Brett Scott article on what money is . And, more importantly, what money could be. It was an eye opener. Because: “The more we abstract and fetishise money as a thing in itself, the more we lose sight of its sources and its goals.” Wait a minute. Isn’t money just Barter 2.0? A way to exchange goods or services? Scott says No. So what’s the difference between barter and money? “In the former, nothing is left unresolved and no faith is required. It’s a closed circuit, a like-for-like swap. By contrast, money transactions are never closed; you pass on an abstract, faith-based claim in exchange for a tangible good.” At first, this sounds like a technicality. If everyone in the economy accepts that form of money, what’s the risk? The risk comes from the fact that there exists an entity that can print money. To see why that matters, consider this: if t...