ODI and T20 Fast Bowling Master Class

 

Why do prices rise in capitalism?

 

Spin Bowlers' Interviews by Murali Kartik

 

Ravi Ashwin

Part 1

Part 2

Graeme Swann

Part 1

Part 2

Daniel Vettori

Ramesh Powar and Rahul Sanghvi

Part 1

Part 2

Dilip Doshi

Maninder Singh

Part 1

Part 2

Harbhajan Singh

Part 1

Part 2

Muttiah Muralitharan

Part 1

Part 2

Laxman Sivaramakrishnan

Part 1

Part 2

Amit Mishra

Part 1

Part 2

Saqlain Mushtaq

Part 1

Part 2

Economics for Non Economists 7: Demonetisation and Indian Economy

 by Girish Menon

 

My friend Shekar has asked the following questions which I will attempt to simplify and answer:

Why do these people keep blaming demonetization? What’s the link to economic prosperity? With such a high saving ability in the middle class, why do they talk about suspensions over moratorium? Is giving handouts the only solution? 

Please explain me how spending on a car, tv, consumer goods etc is going to save the planet? How many TVs would one require so that economist feel there economic prosperity on a nation? 

Me changing my iPhone every year benefits whom; Apple or India?

What about the fake currencies that were bought into our country that vastly created this economic imbalance and parallel economy in our country. If it’s that bad why aren’t people on the streets?

 

Let me start by explaining how one man’s spending is another man’s income and how demonetisation undermined the recycling of money within the Indian economy.

 

In economics there is a term called the Multiplier Effect. A simple definition is “a phenomenon whereby a given change in a particular input, such as government spending, causes a larger change in an output, such as gross domestic product”.

 

To give you an example, suppose say the Modi government actually spent the Rs. 20,000 crores in the economy which it promised to do earlier this year. This money would go to other businesses who will have new business orders. They will in turn employ more workers, buy more machinery which will create additional demand in the economy. These workers and machinery sellers will further spend their income buying goods and services creating even more demand in the economy. In this process of recycling money between the government, businesses and consumers the overall effect of additional government spending of Rs. 20,000 crores may be Rs. 40, 000 crores etc giving a much higher boost to growth and employment within the Indian economy. Now, this is an example of a positive multiplier and is recommended when an economy is in recession. Media reports seem to indicate that the Modi government did not actually give this additional boost to the economy.

 

Now, you can visualise what would happen when you decide to demonetise* some currency. You are reducing the money available to circulate between governments, firms and consumers within the economy. And the immediate effect of demonetisation was that many cash based industries folded starting a negative cycle of less demand therefore less employment leading to even less demand…in a downward cycle.

 

Demonetisation, as per the Modi government, may have been used to combat immediate political threats. However the economic fall out is inescapable in terms of fall in the rate of economic growth and hardships to ordinary people.

 

The timing of the decision may have been politically apt but for an economy that had already declining rates of growth this decision worsened the conditions within the economy. Covid and the lockdown completed the disaster with a 24% fall in GDP that was explained away as an ‘Act of God’.

 

The link to economic prosperity is the belief that as the GDP of an economy rises the people become materially well off and therefore more prosperous. I have explained this in an earlier piece here.

 

As far as the savings of the middle class is concerned these may have been affected by liquidity issues along with unemployment. They may have invested in property and other illiquid ‘assets’ which may be affected by lack of demand and lower prices. Hence they may not be able to repay their debts, mortgages…and hence the call for suspensions/moratoriums.

 

Is giving handouts the only solution? The objective of most governments is to generate a positive multiplier effect. In the western world, governments have given cheap loans and subsidies to firms but it has not resulted in a satisfactory positive multiplier. So, one of the possible solutions is called helicopter money or what you call handouts. The logic is that if you give money to those who need it most i.e. the poor, they will use it to buy goods and create demand in the economy which may kickstart a positive multiplier effect.

 

Your comments on buying iPhones and TVs should be understood with the need for economic growth and recycling of money within an economy. If the money is with you then it becomes your patriotic duty to consume and not save. The environmental damage is well documented and yet only paid lip-service to currently. GDP and economic growth are the unquestioned Ram Janambhoomis of the economic world. Remember, Modi and his 5 trillion economy boast. So, in this model which we have accepted, one way of sustaining growth is for consumers to keep on buying goods because if she stops then the process of recycling slows down and the economy will go into a downward spiral.

 

As for the fake currencies brought into the country; the one positive thing is that such currencies gave the economy a positive boost as it circulated between the people and businesses. It may at the same time have helped Modi's/India’s political enemies in the process. So the right question to ask would be, ‘who has demonetisation damaged more: Indians many of who were Modi's supporters or Modi/India's political enemies more?’

---

*Demonetisation is not always a bad tactic. Keynesian economists will argue that when the rate of economic growth is rising and there is a fear that a crash is imminent then at such a time reducing the money supply could be a reasonable decision to temper the high rate of growth.

What's behind the headlines demanding a return to the office?

Instead of reimagining the world of work, our censorious press backs those whose wealth depends on the commuter-driven status quo writes Hettie O'Brien in The Guardian

‘Nobody can think that risking their health to save a multimillion-pound sandwich chain is a sensible endeavour.’ Photograph: Peter Summers/Getty Images

 With a deadly virus smaller than a speck of dust still circulating, it’s natural that many office workers would rather be doing their jobs from home. Though this inadvertent mass experiment in home working hasn’t been universally enjoyable, particularly for those living in cramped accommodation or juggling work and children, it has at least freed many from commuting, allowed some to spend more time in their local communities, and made cities less congested as a result.

But this isn’t what you’d think from the censorius press coverage of home working, which has treated it as a collective sickness that is stalling Britain’s recovery. Last week, the Daily Telegraph ran a piece stating that workers remaining at home will be more vulnerable to redundancy, with bosses finding it far easier to hand P45s to employees they haven’t seen during the pandemic. Its language was telling: people must “go back to work”, as if they are not already working.

An article in the Daily Mail reprimanded office workers for “boasting smugly about their exciting new ‘work/life balance’ and the amount of money they are saving on their railway season tickets”, as if these were morally reprehensible acts. “If your job can be done from home it can be done from abroad, where wages are lower”, TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp warned on Twitter, adding: “if I had an office job I’d want to be first in the queue to get back to work and prove my worth”. The meaning of these veiled threats is clear: if you stay at home, expect to lose your job.

Beneath this scolding is a message directed at those who aren’t complying with the old status quo. The service economy in financialised city centres depends on the consumption patterns of office workers: commuting every day involves not just buying a sandwich or a coffee from Pret, but helping to prop up an entire system. Were it not for the vast numbers flowing out of stations every morning, the capacity to extract astronomical rents, both from commercial and residential properties, would shrivel – and city centres would no longer be soulless corporate landscapes where multiple franchises of the same chain restaurant can be found within walking distance of each other.

Warnings from the CBI that city centres could become “ghost towns” if commuters never return belie reality: these have long been sterile places devoid of character – it’s just that in the past, it seemed unlikely they might change.

A recent YouGov poll gauging enthusiasm for this back-to-work mantra found that support for workplaces “encouraging [workers] to return to the office” correlated with age: 44% of over-65s agreed with this statement, while only 25% of 25- to 49-year-olds did so. That the over-65s, the age group least likely to be returning to the office, are the most enthusiastic supporters of this principle is unsurprising. The idea that you’ve got to be physically present to prove your value to your boss encodes an entire attitude to work – one firmly rooted in the Taylorist management doctrine of the 20th century, when employees were expected to conform to the objectives of the firm in exchange for a permanent contract. Today, the expectation of worker “flexibility” is more widespread, and surveillance that once relied on office overseers can now be conducted online (indeed, since the start of the pandemic, the demand for software that monitors workers while they’re working from home has surged).

Despite the media paranoia over home working, many managers don’t really seem to care that people aren’t back in the office. Some companies have said they will move to remote working full time, or at least allow employees to work this way some of the time. The people who seem most concerned about going back to work aren’t workers, or managers, but rentiers – a category that applies to many retiree readers of the Daily Mail and the Telegraph, a demographic that is likely to have paid off mortgages, receives generous pensions and contains a higher proportion of private landlords, and to the rentiers who have funneled their wealth into assets such as real estate and office spaces concentrated in urban centres. Until recently, both of these groups were relatively insulated from economic shocks affecting the labour market, their wealth dependent on the continuation of an old normal that now seems more precarious than ever.

The monstering of home working doesn’t really stem from concern about workers’ productivity or mental wellbeing. Instead it’s an attack on those who dare flout the rules that sustained the old normal. The survival of city centres, and by extension the businesses that extract rent from them, relies upon everyone playing their part – most of all workers. Telling people they must return to the office whatever the circumstances is a way to circumvent critique and insist upon the old normal returning, as if repeating a mantra were all it took to make it true.

When newspapers shriek that workers must return to the office, despite the reality that many don’t want to, they’re voicing what the sociologist Luc Boltanski called a “system of confirmation” – an utterance that is neither truth nor fact, but rather a way of reinforcing the status quo. But nobody can think that risking their health to save a multimillion pound sandwich chain is a sensible endeavour.

Since the pandemic began, societal changes that were supposed to be impossible have happened with relative ease. Workers were sent home overnight, and it now seems that many can do their jobs, if not fully remotely, then at least partially from home. Already, many people are talking of moving away from big cities to avoid the costs of high rent and long commuting times. And behind the claims of economic catastrophe caused by a drop in commuting, some independent businesses have reported that they are thriving. Instead of asking what will happen to city centres if the commuters never returned, we should be asking: what would the city, and the economy, look like if they weren’t organised this way?

Can the Modi Government Revive the Indian Economy - Prof. Jayati Ghose

 

An Aatmanirbhar Musalman could be the pride of an Aatmanirbhar Bharat.

Muslims love Hindu liberals conditionally, and together they hate the microscopic Muslim liberals unconditionally writes NAJMUL HODA in The Print

 

India’s Muslims and liberals are withering in each other’s embrace. The liberal discourse in India has come in for sharp criticism not only from the Right-wing but also the non-partisan centrists for being unprincipled in its tacit indulgence of minorityism, which might have widened the chasm between the majority and minority communities where the former is always a bully and the latter always has its back to the wall.

It has been often said that despite mouthing the platitude of mainstreaming the minority, liberals helped in institutionalising minorityism. It cocooned liberals in a paternalistic aura.

The situation was further exacerbated when the middle caste’s electoral assertion piggybacked on the Muslim vote. OBCs and minority politics were found cosying up in the bed of secularism. This was a marriage of convenience.

How did liberalism come to this when it had been the byword for everything progressive, humanistic, secular, democratic, reformative and transformative; and a default opposite of obscurantism, regression and totalitarianism? It is for these reasons that Indian Muslims’ relationship with so-called liberals has started yielding diminishing returns in politics today. Either liberalism gets a makeover, or the relationship is re-invented, or the Muslim community begins to invest in its own liberals.

Different trajectories

But how could the ascendant Hindutva politics blame liberals of political opportunism and cultural deracination? It’s another surprise that these accusations also began to stick. To understand this, let’s trace its trajectory.

A dialectic tussle between the agents of change and the votaries of status quo is the hallmark of a living society. As the colonial impetus stirred India into a new life, the first generation of Hindus in modern education devoted themselves to religious and social reformation. This laid the foundation for a liberal nationalist politics in India.

The Muslim trajectory was different. They were latecomers to modern education which, again, had come at the cost of abandoning religious critique and social reform. A superficial modernity without its moral and intellectual values could be the right instrument for revivalism. The two politics, Hindu and Muslim, because of the different preparatory grounds they stood on, went in different directions. While one aimed at forming India into a nation and winning independence for it, the other wanted to make the Muslim community into a separate nation.

However, the intrinsic sincerity of the liberal political class and the exigency to put up a united front against colonialism made it accommodate the separatist tendencies in order to forge a composite territorial nationalism. This template endured for a century. It had some quaint tropes, which left no urge among Muslims to liberalise.

Century-old tropes

The first instance of mollycoddling was to sanitise the history of Muslim rule. In the history books, the testimony of contemporary chroniclers such as Ziauddin Barani, Abdul Malik Isami and Ferishta, etc. was ignored in order to paint an idyllic picture of cultural confluence. In a travesty of secularisation, acts of temple destruction, Jizya tax imposition, and forced conversion would be presented as inspired by political exigency, not religious fanaticism. It was as if desecration for political reasons would be less obnoxious. It gave a clean chit to the principle of statecraft that would permit such a sacrilege even if it were actually a pretext.

Although done with the good intention of not letting the bad blood of the past spill onto the present, a total whitewashing didn’t let the people develop the maturity to face up the past and recognise its wrongs. One is not answerable for what their real or adopted ancestors did, but they shape their own attitude towards the past. If one sees glories in the good of it, they would have to partake of its bad too.

The second trope was the romanticisation of Islam as an egalitarian religion and Muslims as a casteless society. Conversion to Islam was credited to the equality in Muslim society. The fact, however, was that people carried their caste into the new religion and remained at the same level as earlier. The Muslim ruling class adopted the caste system and placed itself at the apex. In fact, their emphasis on foreign lineage as a mark of superiority infused a fresh racial element into it.

Besides caste, gender issue was the main area of social reform in Hindu society. True, Muslims didn’t have a Sati system, but they had all other patriarchal discriminations. In fact, purdah among the Hindu upper class was an influence of Muslims.

It became conventional wisdom that Muslims didn’t need to introspect, reform or liberalise. And so, when independent India’s most ambitious social reform programme was undertaken, and Hindu Code Bills were introduced, the Muslim Personal Law was left untouched on the plea that the push for reform had to come from within the community. It never came, and instead became the basis of identitarian politics as was seen during the Shah Bano and triple talaq cases.

Mere tactical allies

The sanitised history repeated itself first as a tragedy and next as a farce. The tragedy was the liberal argument in the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi case that there was no proof that the mosque in Ayodhya was built on a demolished temple. Its implication for such mosques as were clearly built on demolished temples was not weighed in. And, the farce was in the revisionist historiography of Partition, which invisibilised the fact that, in the end, it was the Muslim League that demanded Pakistan, and had it. Such historiography helped in reviving the same old pernicious narrative.

The dictum that minority communalism was a lesser evil was myopic inasmuch as it ignored its ability to inflame majoritarian. The paternalistic minorityism of liberals made them equivocate on burning issues. So, in one kind of bomb blast, terror had no religion; but in another, it did. The discourse of ‘hurt sentiment’ became normalised as demands to ban now a book and now a movie became the norm. The Right-wing learnt fast, and how.

In spite of all this, no organic relationship could develop between liberals and Muslims. Both treated each other as tactical allies rather than ideological kin. In the Muslim repertoire of grievances against the present dispensation, there is hardly one that has not been levelled against liberals since the late 19th century (Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s speech at Meerut, 16 March 1888 ). The Islam-in-danger rhetoric, paranoia of subjugation by Hindus, neglect of Urdu, under-representation in services, bias in the behaviour of state machinery, particularly that of police during riots, and myriad other complaints of discriminations are century-old tropes.

Aatmanirbhar Musalman

Muslims love Hindu liberals conditionally, and together they hate the microscopic Muslim liberals unconditionally. Muslims love liberals because the latter don’t question their narratives, and liberals value Muslims because they are their only support left. In an India where two kinds of Hindus are debating how to engage with Muslims, the liberals represent them without questioning why Muslims are unable to represent themselves, and whether the 200-year-long liberal hegemony of public discourse has any responsibility for it.

There is no redemption for Muslims unless they develop their own liberal intelligentsia, and no comeback for liberals unless they become more scrupulous about their avowed principles. True, Muslims are not represented in all sectors of the national life in proportion to their population. It not only reflects their lag in modern education but also the lack of drive and initiative in their corporate life.

At about 20 crore, the Muslim population is so huge that even a minuscule percentage of its educated and affluent would be humongous enough to constitute the critical mass for a big social change. One reason why this has not happened is the community’s utter dependence on the liberal establishment for representing them. Muslims could represent themselves in the idiom of the modern nation state only if they had crafted their own discourse and coined their own vocabulary. It’s very much doable. An Aatmanirbhar Musalman could be the pride of an Aatmanirbhar Bharat.