Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Last December, the chaos and flight disruptions created by IndiGo were enormous and terrible. The penalty imposed on them was a paltry ₹22 crore (no prizes for guessing what must have transpired behind the scenes).   The root cause identified by the DGCA (Directorate General for Civil Aviation) though did make sense: “an overriding focus on maximising utilisation of crew, aircraft, and network resources”. Such an (over)emphasis then “significantly reduced roster buffer margins” and “adversely impacted operational resilience”.   But, while the above reason is valid, it wasn’t complete. IndiGo had clearly assumed the new regulations (on rest hours between flights) would not be enforced by the government and therefore had not prepared to meet them (by reducing flights or hiring more pilots/crew). And why did they make that assumption? Because they held a 65% market share, and they assumed that if they couldn’t/wouldn’t meet the new regulations, well, surely the governmen...

The hugely popular game, Monopoly , was invented in 1903 by Elizabeth Magie who was not a fan of capitalism, but left-wing in her views! “The problems of the new century were so vast, the income inequalities so massive and the monopolists so mighty that it seemed impossible that an unknown woman… stood a chance at easing society’s ills with something as trivial as a board game. But she had to try.” In a political magazine, she described her game and how it reflected life: “It is a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences.” Surprisingly, she came up two sets of rules for the game: “An anti-monopolist set in which all were rewarded when wealth was created, and a monopolist set in which the goal was to create monopolies and crush opponents.” I loved Monopoly as a kid. So too does my 8 yo daughter. As does almost every one of her friends. As a kid, it’s the closest thing to dealing with money: buying, ...

As the Amazon v/s Hachette (one of the Big Publishers) war heated up, a non-Hachette author, John Green, worried if this was a sign of how Amazon was going to start abusing its monopolistic power: “What's ultimately at stake is whether Amazon is going to be able to freely and permanently bully publishers into eventual nonexistence.” (If you are wondering, Amazon increased the delivery time of all Hachette books. And some Hachette books stopped showing up altogether in Amazon search). So is Amazon the bad guy? Well, it certainly isn’t the only bad guy. Hachette was part of the cartel that worked with Apple to artificially keep e-book prices high. This wasn’t just an accusation; the publishers settled matters in a US court in 2013, albeit without admitting guilt. The court ordered all those publishers to re-negotiate e-book prices with everyone, including Apple and Amazon. And it is as part of those negotiations that the war has started. Amazon says the issue isn’t abo...

I’ve played a lot of Monopoly when I was a kid, and like anyone at that age, neither knew nor cared about the history or the origins of the game. So it was kind of a surprise to me to read this history of the game that talked about how it may have been designed to drive home the downside of monopolies and the benefits of co-operation! Officially (and as per the patents record), Monopoly was invented by Charles Darrow. But it looks like a very similar game was invented by Lizzie Magie to teach: “the philosophy of Henry George, a nineteenth-century writer who had popularized the notion that no single person could claim to “own” land.” Henry George was disgusted with the economic system of the day where landowners got rent even though they were doing nothing. Whereas the people who worked on that land and produced value (agricultural or industrial goods) made nothing since most of their income got transferred as land rent. So he concluded that “private property in land...

Some time back, I read this article in the Guardian on the pricing of eBooks v/s physical books . The argument was something like this: the value of the book, physical or electronic, is almost entirely because of the content ("text itself"). If you agree with that (and I can’t see who can disagree with it), then the article said that “the delivery method shouldn't matter much”. So, the article argues, the price of an eBook should be the same as the price of the physical book (after all, isn’t the content the same?). The conclusion part, I don’t agree with at all. Because the article confuses 2 different things: value and price. Conventional, prehistoric thinking would suggest the two are the same. But, on the Internet, do you pay for Wikipedia or Google? And since you don’t, does that mean you don’t value those 2 sites?! Then that article goes after Amazon, accusing them of using their monopolistic position to drive down the price of eBooks so that they can promote sa...