Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In a polarized India, several people in India wonder how much British colonialism hurt India and helped Britain. (To clarify, such people are not denying that colonialism was beneficial to the colonizer – why else would they be doing it? Their question is about the extent of damage to the colony, whether it is exaggerated or not). Quantifying that damage is hard, if not impossible. After all, there were no formal ways of tracking the purchasing power of money across countries, or metrics like GDP or per-capita income. How can you arrive at a numerical value of damage?   But other counterfactual ways of looking at the question help understand the extent of the damage, even if not numerically. Take two such examples. ~~   Take China’s solar panels industry. The Chinese government doesn’t necessarily pick or back specific companies within a sector, but it does pick sectors which it considers important – for employment, for national security etc. For such sectors, t...

When the recent terrorist attack in Christchurch (New Zealand) was broadcast live on Facebook, many went ballistic at social media for having no filters/checks against such material. And many have been cursing Facebook and WhatsApp for circulating “fake news”. Few would deny that we have major problems on these fronts. That said, there is no clear solution either. Let’s see why it is so hard to fix these things. As Ben Thompson writes , on the Internet, we are used to things being free. And there are three types of “free”: “ “Free as in speech” means the freedom or right to do something “Free as in beer” means that you get something for free without any additional responsibility “Free as in puppy” means that you get something for free, but the longterm costs are substantial” Many of us agree with the “Free as in speech” part to varying degrees. But what the world gets via social media is a combo of two free’s: “Facebook and YouTube offer “free as in speech” in conju...

Every time a non-First World country hosts the Olympics or football World Cup, a bunch of people in India will start lamenting that India can’t host such an event. The most recent for such comments is Brazil hosting the Olympics. Forget the Kalmadi fiasco and how such an event would actually be handled in India. Even if it were managed right, should any country in their right mind want to host such an event? National ego boosting aside, it is almost always financially ruinous. Even for rich countries that already have good facilities, hotels and transport systems in place. A poor country has to build even those; and such projects always overrun their budget, even in rich countries . London (2012) did an accounting trick to claim they came in under budget: they simply increased the planned cost value from £2.4 billion to £9 billion! So how much do countries spend in hosting an Olympics? An analysis of all events from 1988 (Seoul) to 2016 (Rio) indicate that the cheapest...

When it comes to hosting the FIFA (football) World Cup, countries are usually falling over themselves to own, as per this article by Ravi Dev , the white elephant. Hosting a World Cup is very expensive. For not so rich countries, the sums involved are enough “to completely transform a (host) country’s political and economic agenda”! Take “Brazil’s over-budget World Cup”, says Dev: it’s estimated to cost more than $13.5 billion, the most expensive World Cup till date. Now consider that Brazil is similar to India in terms of how well off it is, and you’d wonder whether that money would have been better spent on, I don’t know, roads or hospitals or schools? Or consider the weird case of selecting Qatar as the venue for 2022. The estimates there would blow you away: $200 billion! Why the astronomical sum, you wonder? The venue for the final, Lusail, is a city that is yet to be built! No, not a typo: the city is going to be built for the World Cup and will cost $45 billion. Why FI...