Vande Mataram and India's Minorities

The State of Indian Cricket Commentary

Sanjay Manjrekar is ‘happy to apologise’ for his reinstatement in the BCCI commentary panel writes Devendra Pandey in The Indian Express

Sanjay Manjrekar (File)

Five months after he was removed from the BCCI commentary panel, former cricketer Sanjay Manjrekar has written to Board president Sourav Ganguly and other members of the Apex Council explaining his position and offering to apologise “if I have offended anyone.”

Manjrekar stated that he would be “happy to apologise” and that the sacking has “shaken my confidence” and was a “big jolt”. In this communication accessed by The Indian Express, Manjrekar noted that he was told by a BCCI official on phone that he was sacked because “some players had an issue with me as a commentator”.

The mail was a precursor to another letter the former batsman wrote to Board officials requesting his reinstatement in the commentary panel for the upcoming edition of the Indian Premier League – most likely to be held in the United Arab Emirates – and promising to abide by the regulations set by the BCCI.

“You are already in receipt of the email I sent to explain my position as commentator. With the IPL dates announced, bcci.tv will pick its commentary panel soon. I will be happy to work as per the guidelines laid by you. After all, we are working on what is essentially your production. Last time, maybe there was not enough clarity on this issue,” he wrote.

It has been speculated that Manjrekar was removed from the panel as a result of his comment calling Ravindra Jadeja a “bits-and-pieces player” during last year’s ODI World Cup and the subsequent reactions from fans and the player himself were an important trigger in him losing his job.

On July 3 last year, Jadeja had tweeted his ire at Manjrekar’s comments: “Still, I have played twice the number of matches you have played and I am still playing. Learn to respect ppl who have achieved. I have heard enough of your verbal diarrhea @Sanjaymanjrekar”.

After his half-century in the World Cup semi-final against New Zealand, Jadeja had gesticulated angrily towards the commentary studio. The official Twitter handle of the ICC posted a video of a post-match discussion involving Manjrekar. “By bits and by pieces, he just ripped me apart today. Bits of pieces of sheer brilliance, he proved me all wrong,” he had said that day.

In his first mail to Board officials, Manjrekar also flagged the perils of being a commentator in these times. “If we are not seen praising the iconic players all the time, the fans of those players tend to assume that we are antagonistic towards the players they worship … Anyone who has followed my career as a commentator would know that I have no malicious agenda against anyone and that my opinions come from a very pure place that I hold sacred. It’s cricket we are talking about, a sport that’s given me and my father so much,” Manjrekar stated. “I was greatly hurt! Especially because this came as a real shock!” he added.

Manjrekar reiterated his willingness to apologise. “So, really, this sacking for whatever reason, has shaken my confidence as a professional. If unwittingly, I have offended anyone I would be happy to apologise to the concerned party.”

Manjrekar also brought up the Jadeja issue in great detail in his email to the Apex Council, attaching an audio file of his comments. “You will see how benign it is when you hear it in right context”. He also wrote, “The player concerned obviously misunderstood this or was perhaps misinformed. By the way, the player and I have since privately made peace over this issue.”

He stated that the comment was not made during commentary but in an interview. “Please note this comment was not made by me on Twitter or in commentary, it was in an audio interview to a news agency… that got blown out of proportion. It was made as a part of a long media interview but unfortunately was made into an eye-catching headline by just one website and the player reacted sharply to it on Twitter. This got the issue the traction it did not deserve. ‘Bits-and-pieces’ is a cricketing term commonly used for cricketers who are non-specialists. It is regularly used by commentators to describe certain players and it’s never considered to be demeaning.”

In his email, Manjrekar listed out his standing as a commentator until he was “suddenly not found good enough”. “Until this moment I had been the leading commentator on the BCCI panel for many years fulfilling some of the biggest responsibilities there are in live broadcasting: lead commentator, post-match awards presenter, hosting the toss, doing player interviews and yes, impromptu BCCI functions on ground too. I am also one of the first Indian commentators that gets rostered for the World Cups by the ICC. I did my job with great pride and a 100 per cent commitment and suddenly not found to be good enough to be in the panel was a big jolt.”

Excerpts from Manjrekar’s email to BCCI

Dear esteemed members of the Apex Council,

In February 2020, completely out of the blue, I was told by Dev Shriyan, the head of production, BCCI Tv, that I was being removed from the commentary panel.

I have publicly maintained that — “the BCCI are my employers and they have every right to either have me or not, in their commentary panel. I have never considered being on a commentary panel an entitlement.”

But here, amongst a small circle of important stakeholders of Indian cricket, friends and colleagues, please allow me to open my heart.

I was greatly hurt! Especially because this came as a real shock!

I did my job with great pride and a 100 percent commitment and suddenly not found to be good enough to be in the panel was a big jolt.

Later I was told on phone by a senior office bearer that some players had an issue with me as a commentator . Now here is where our job gets a bit tricky.

If we are not seen praising the iconic players all the time, the fans of those players tend to assume that we are antagonistic towards the players they worship. That’s the professional hazard we have to live with doing our job. Anyone who has followed my career as a commentator would know that I have no malicious agenda against anyone and that my opinions come from a very pure place that I hold sacred. It’s cricket we are talking about, a sport that’s given me and my father so much.

My comments and opinions could be wrong, but they are never personal, derogatory or borne out of prejudice or cunning design, I am only biased towards excellence in performances, whether it’s a team or a player.

Now, let’s take the ‘ bits and pieces’ comment that got blown out of proportion during the last World Cup.

‘Bits and pieces’ is a cricketing term commonly used for cricketers who are non-specialists. It is regularly used by commentators to describe certain players and it’s never considered to be demeaning.

The player concerned obviously misunderstood this or was perhaps misinformed. By the way, the player and I have since privately made peace over this issue.

So, really, this sacking for whatever reason, has shaken my confidence as a professional. If unwittingly, I have offended anyone I would be happy to apologise to the concerned party.

Regards,
Sanjay

GDP Is the Wrong Tool for Measuring What Matters

Joseph E Stiglitz in Scientific American

Since World War II, most countries around the world have come to use gross domestic product, or GDP, as the core metric for prosperity. The GDP measures market output: the monetary value of all the goods and services produced in an economy during a given period, usually a year. Governments can fail if this number falls—and so, not surprisingly, governments strive to make it climb. But striving to grow GDP is not the same as ensuring the well-being of a society.

In truth, “GDP measures everything,” as Senator Robert Kennedy famously said, “except that which makes life worthwhile.” The number does not measure health, education, equality of opportunity, the state of the environment or many other indicators of the quality of life. It does not even measure crucial aspects of the economy such as its sustainability: whether or not it is headed for a crash. What we measure matters, though, because it guides what we do. Americans got an inkling of this causal connection during the Vietnam War, with the military's emphasis on “body counts”: the weekly tabulation of the number of enemy soldiers killed. Reliance on this morbid metric led U.S. forces to undertake operations that had no purpose except to raise the body count. Like a drunk looking for his keys under the lamppost (because that is where the light is), the emphasis on body counts kept us from understanding the bigger picture: the slaughter was inducing more Vietnamese people to join the Viet Cong than U.S. forces were killing.

Now a different body count—that from COVID-19—is proving to be a horribly good measure of societal performance. It has little correlation with GDP. The U.S. is the richest country in the world, with a GDP of more than $20 trillion in 2019, a figure that suggested we had a highly efficient economic engine, a racing car that could outperform any other. But the U.S. recorded upward of 100,000 deaths by June, whereas Vietnam, with a GDP of $262 billion (and a mere 4 percent of U.S. GDP per capita) had zero. In the race to save lives, this less prosperous country has beaten us handily.

In fact, the American economy is more like an ordinary car whose owner saved on gas by removing the spare tire, which was fine until he got a flat. And what I call “GDP thinking”—seeking to boost GDP in the misplaced expectation that that alone would enhance well-being—led us to this predicament. An economy that uses its resources more efficiently in the short term has higher GDP in that quarter or year. Seeking to maximize that macroeconomic measure translates, at a microeconomic level, to each business cutting costs to achieve the highest possible short-term profits. But such a myopic focus necessarily compromises the performance of the economy and society in the long term.

The U.S. health care sector, for example, took pride in using hospital beds efficiently: no bed was left unused. In consequence, when SARS-CoV-2 reached America there were only 2.8 hospital beds per 1,000 people—far fewer than in other advanced countries—and the system could not absorb the sudden surge in patients. Doing without paid sick leave in meat-packing plants increased profits in the short run, which also increased GDP. But workers could not afford to stay home when sick; instead they came to work and spread the infection. Similarly, China made protective masks cheaper than the U.S. could, so importing them increased economic efficiency and GDP. That meant, however, that when the pandemic hit and China needed far more masks than usual, hospital staff in the U.S. could not get enough. In sum, the relentless drive to maximize short-term GDP worsened health care, caused financial and physical insecurity, and reduced economic sustainability and resilience, leaving Americans more vulnerable to shocks than the citizens of other countries.

The shallowness of GDP thinking had already become evident in the 2000s. In preceding decades, European economists, seeing the success of the U.S. in increasing GDP, had encouraged their leaders to follow American-style economic policies. But as signs of distress in the U.S. banking system mounted in 2007, France's President Nicolas Sarkozy realized that any politician who single-mindedly sought to push up GDP to the neglect of other indicators of the quality of life risked losing the confidence of the public. In January 2008 he asked me to chair an international commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. A panel of experts was to answer the question: How can nations improve their metrics? Measuring that which makes life worthwhile, Sarkozy reasoned, was an essential first step toward enhancing it.

Coincidentally, our initial report in 2009, provocatively entitled Mismeasuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn't Add Up, was published right after the global financial crisis had demonstrated the necessity of revisiting the core tenets of economic orthodoxy. It met with such positive resonance that the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)—a think tank that serves 37 advanced countries—decided to follow up with an expert group. After six years of consultation and deliberation, we reinforced and amplified our earlier conclusion: GDP should be dethroned. In its place, each nation should select a “dashboard”—a limited set of metrics that would help steer it toward the future its citizens desired. In addition to GDP itself, as a measure for market activity (and no more) the dashboard would include metrics for health, sustainability and any other values that the people of a nation aspired to, as well as for inequality, insecurity and other harms that they sought to diminish.

These documents have helped crystallize a global movement toward improved measures of social and economic health. The OECD has adopted the approach in its Better Life Initiative, which recommends 11 indicators—and provides citizens with a way to weigh these for their own country, relative to others, to generate an index that measures their performance on the things they care about. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), traditionally strong advocates of GDP thinking, are now also paying attention to environment, inequality and sustainability of the economy.

A few countries have even incorporated this approach into their policy-making frameworks. New Zealand, for instance, embedded “well-being” indicators in the country's budgetary process in 2019. As the country's finance minister, Grant Robertson, put it: “Success is about making New Zealand both a great place to make a living and a great place to make a life.” This emphasis on well-being may partly explain the nation's triumph over COVID-19, which appears to have been eliminated after roughly 1,500 confirmed cases and 20 deaths in a total population of nearly five million.

APPLES AND ARMAMENTS

Necessity is the mother of invention. Just as the dashboard emerged from a dire need—the inadequacy of the GDP as an indicator of well-being, as revealed by the Great Recession of 2008—so did the GDP. During the Great Depression, U.S. officials could barely quantify the problem. The government did not collect statistics on either inflation or unemployment, which would have helped them steer the economy. So the Department of Commerce charged economist Simon Kuznets of the National Bureau of Economic Research with creating a set of national statistics on income. Kuznets went on to construct the GDP in the 1940s as a simple metric that could be calculated from the exceedingly limited market data then available. An aggregate of (the dollar value of) the goods and services produced in the country, it was equivalent to the sum of everyone's income—wages, profits, rents and taxes. For this and other work, he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1971. (Economist Richard Stone, who created similar statistical systems for the U.K., received the prize in 1984.)

Kuznets repeatedly warned, however, that the GDP only measured market activity and should not be mistaken for a metric of social or even economic well-being. The figure included many goods and services that were harmful (including, he believed, armaments) or useless (financial speculation) and excluded many essential ones that were free (such as caregiving by homemakers). A core difficulty with constructing such an aggregate is that there is no natural unit for adding the value of even apples and oranges, let alone of such disparate things as armaments, financial speculation and caregiving. Thus, economists use their prices as a proxy for value—in the belief that, in a competitive market, prices reflect how much people value apples, oranges, armaments, speculation or caregiving relative to one another.

This profoundly problematic assumption—that price measures relative value—made the GDP quite easy to calculate. As the U.S. recovered from the Depression by ramping up the production and consumption of material goods (in particular, armaments during World War II), GDP grew rapidly. The World Bank and the IMF began to fund development programs in former colonies around the world, gauging their success almost exclusively in terms of GDP growth.

Sources: World Bank (GDP data); U.S. Census Bureau (inequality data); Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (Better Life Index data)

Over time, as economists focused on the intricacies of comparing GDP in different eras and across diverse countries and constructing complex economic models that predicted and explained changes in GDP, they lost sight of the metric's shaky foundations. Students seldom studied the assumptions that went into constructing the measure—and what these assumptions meant for the reliability of any inferences they made. Instead the objective of economic analysis became to explain the movements of this artificial entity. GDP became hegemonic across the globe: good economic policy was taken to be whatever increased GDP the most.

In 1980, following a period of seemingly poor economic performance—stagflation, marked by slow growth and rising prices—President Ronald Reagan assumed office on the promise of ramping up the economy. He deregulated the financial sector and cut taxes for the better-off, arguing that the benefits would “trickle down” to those less fortunate. Although GDP grew somewhat (albeit at a rate markedly lower than in the decades after World War II), inequality rose precipitously. Well aware that metrics matter, some members of the administration reportedly argued for stopping the collection of statistics on inequality. If Americans did not know how bad inequality was, presumably we would not worry about it.

The Reagan administration also unleashed unprecedented assaults on the environment, issuing leases for fossil-fuel extraction on millions of acres of public lands, for example. In 1995 I joined the Council of Economic Advisers for President Bill Clinton. Worrying that our metrics paid too little attention to resource depletion and environmental degradation, we worked with the Department of Commerce to develop a measure of “green” GDP, which would take such losses into account. When the congressional representatives from the coal states got wind of this, however, they threatened to cut off our funding unless we stopped our work, which we were obliged to.

The politicians knew that if Americans understood how bad coal was for our economy correctly measured, then they would seek the elimination of the hidden subsidies that the coal industry receives. And they might even seek to move more quickly to renewables. Although our efforts to broaden our metrics were stymied, the fact that these representatives were willing to spend so much political capital on stopping us convinced me that we were on to something really important. (And it also meant that when, a decade later, Sarkozy approached me about heading an international panel to examine better ways of measuring “economic performance and social progress,” I leaped at the chance.)

I left the Council of Economic Advisers in 1997, and in the ensuing years the deregulatory fervor of the Reagan era came to grip the Clinton administration. The financial sector of the U.S. economy was ballooning, driving up GDP. As it turned out, many of the profits that gave that sector such heft were, in a sense, phony. Bankers' lending practices had generated a real-estate bubble that had artificially enhanced profits—and, with their pay being linked to profits, had increased their bonuses. In the ideal free-market economy, an increase in profits is supposed to reflect an increase in societal well-being, but the bankers' takings put the lie to that notion. Much of their profits resulted from making others worse off, such as when they engaged in abusive credit-card practices or manipulated LIBOR (for London Interbank Offered Rate of interest for international banks lending to one another) to enhance their earnings.

But GDP figures took these inflated figures at face value, convincing policy makers that the best way to grow the economy was to remove any remaining regulations that constrained the finance sector. Long-standing prohibitions on usury—charging outrageous interest rates to take advantage of the unwary—were stripped away. In 2000 the so-called Commodity Modernization Act was passed. It was designed to ensure that derivatives (risky financial products that played a big role in bringing down the financial system just eight years later) would never be regulated. In 2005 a bankruptcy law made it more difficult for those having trouble paying their bills to discharge their debts—making it almost impossible for those with student loans to do so.

By the early 2000s two fifths of corporate profits came from the financial sector. That fraction should have signaled that something was wrong: an efficient financial sector should entail low costs for engaging in financial transactions and therefore should be small. Ours was huge. Untethering the market had inflated profits, driving up GDP—and, as it turned out, instability.

OPIOIDS, HURRICANES

The bubble burst in 2008. Banks had been issuing mortgages indiscriminately, on the assumption that real-estate prices would continue to rise. When the housing bubble broke, so did the economy, falling more than it had since the immediate aftermath of World War II. After the U.S. government rescued the banks (just one firm, AIG, received a government bailout of $130 billion), GDP improved, persuading President Barack Obama and the Federal Reserve to announce that we were well on the way to recovery. But with 91 percent of the gains in income in 2009 to 2012 going to the top 1 percent, the majority of Americans experienced none.

As the country slowly emerged from the financial crisis, others commanded attention: the inequality crisis, the climate crisis and an opioid crisis. Even as GDP continued to rise, life expectancy and other broader measures of health worsened. Food companies were developing and marketing, with great ingenuity, addictive sugar-rich foods, augmenting GDP but precipitating an epidemic of childhood diabetes. Addictive opioids led to an epidemic of drug deaths, but the profits of Purdue Pharma and the other villains in that drama added to GDP. Indeed, the medical expenditures resulting from these health crises also boosted GDP. Americans were spending twice as much per person on health care than the French but had lower life expectancy. So, too, coal mining seemingly boosted the economy, and although it helped to drive climate change, worsening the impact of hurricanes such as Harvey, the efforts to rebuild again added to GDP. The GDP number provided an optimistic gloss to the worst of events.

These examples illustrate the disjuncture between GDP and societal well-being and the many ways that GDP fails to be a good measure of economic performance. The growth in GDP before 2008 was not sustainable, and it was not sustained. The increase in bank profits that seemed to fuel GDP in the years before the crisis were not only at the expense of the well-being of the many people whom the financial sector exploited but also at the expense of GDP in later years. The increase in inequality was by any measure hurting our society, but GDP was celebrating the banks' successes. If there ever was an event that drove home the need for new ways of measuring economic performance and societal progress, the 2008 crisis was it.

Credit: Samantha Mash

THE DASHBOARD

The commission, led by three economists (Amartya Sen of Harvard University, Jean-Paul Fitoussi of the Paris Institute of Political Studies and me), published its first report in 2009, just after the U.S. financial system imploded. We pointed out that measuring something as simple as the fraction of Americans who might have difficulty refinancing their mortgages would have illuminated the smoke and mirrors underpinning the heady economic growth preceding the crisis and possibly enabled policy makers to fend it off. More important, building and paying attention to a broad set of metrics for present-day well-being and its sustainability—whether good times are durable—would help buffer societies against future shocks.

We need to know whether, when GDP is going up, indebtedness is increasing or natural resources are being depleted; these may indicate that the economic growth is not sustainable. If pollution is rising along with GDP, growth is not environmentally sustainable. A good indicator of the true health of an economy is the health of its citizens, and if, as in the U.S., life expectancy has been going down—as it was even before the pandemic—that should be worrying, no matter what is happening to GDP. If median income (that of the families in the middle) is stagnating even as GDP rises, that means the fruits of economic growth are not being shared.

It would have been nice, of course, if we could have come up with a single measure that would summarize how well a society or even an economy is doing—a GDP plus number, say. But as with the GDP itself, too much valuable information is lost when we form an aggregate. Say, you are driving your car. You want to know how fast you are going and glance at the speedometer. It reads 70 miles an hour. And you want to know how far you can go without refilling your tank, which turns out to be 200 miles. Both those numbers are valuable, conveying information that could affect your behavior. But now assume you form a simple aggregate by adding up the two numbers, with or without “weights.” What would a number like 270 tell you? Absolutely nothing. It would not tell you whether you are driving recklessly or how worried you should be about running out of fuel.

That was why we concluded that each nation needs a dashboard—a set of numbers that would convey essential diagnostics of its society and economy and help steer them. Policy makers and civil-society groups should pay attention not only to material wealth but also to health, education, leisure, environment, equality, governance, political voice, social connectedness, physical and economic security, and other indicators of the quality of life. Just as important, societies must ensure that these “goods” are not bought at the expense of the future. To that end, they should focus on maintaining and augmenting, to the extent possible, their stocks of natural, human, social and physical capital. We also laid out a research agenda for exploring links between the different components of well-being and sustainability and developing good ways to measure them.

Concern about climate change and rising inequality had already been fueling a global demand for better measures, and our report crystallized that trend. In 2015 a contentious political process culminated in the United Nations establishing a set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Progress toward them is to be measured by 232 indicators, reflecting the manifold concerns of governments and civil societies from around the world. So many numbers are unhelpful, in our view: one can lose sight of the forest for the trees. Instead another group of experts, chaired by Fitoussi, Martine Durand (chief statistician of the OECD) and me, recommended that each country institute a robust democratic dialogue to discover what issues its citizens most care about.

Such a conversation would almost certainly show that most of us who live in highly developed economies care about our material well-being, our health, the environment around us and our relations with others. We want to do well today but also in the future. We care about how the fruits of our economy are shared: we do not want a society in which a few at the top grab everything for themselves and the rest live in poverty.

A good indicator of the true health of an economy is the health of its citizens. A decline in life expectancy, even for a part of the population, should be worrying, whatever is happening to GDP. And it is important to know if, even as GDP is going up, so, too, is pollution—whether it is emissions of greenhouse gases or particulates in the air. That means growth is not environmentally sustainable.

The choice of indicators may vary across time and among countries. Countries with high unemployment will want to track what is happening to that variable; those with high inequality will want to monitor that. Still, because people generally want to know how they are doing in comparison with others, we recommended that the advanced countries, at least, share some five to 10 common indicators.

GDP would be among them. So would a measure of inequality or some pointer toward how the typical individual or household is doing. Over the years economists have formulated a rash of indicators of inequality, each reflecting a different dimension of the phenomenon. It may well be that societies where inequality has become particularly problematic may need to have metrics reflecting the depth of the poverty at the bottom and the excesses of riches at the top. To me, knowing what is happening to median income is of particular importance; in the U.S., median income has barely changed for decades, even as GDP has grown.

Employment is often used as an indicator of macroeconomic performance—an economy with a high unemployment rate clearly is not using all of its resources well. But in societies where paid work is associated with dignity, employment is a value in its own right. Other elements of the dashboard would include indicators for environmental degradation (say, air or water quality), economic sustainability (indebtedness), health (life expectancy) and insecurity.

Insecurity has both subjective and objective dimensions. We can survey how insecure people feel: how worried they are about adverse effects or how prepared they feel to cope with a shock. But we can also predict the likelihood that someone falls below the poverty line in any given year. And some elements of the dashboard are “intermediate” variables—things that we may (or may not) value in themselves but that provide an inkling of how a society will function in the future. One of these is trust. Societies in which citizens trust their governments and one another to “do the right thing” tend to perform better. In fact, societies in which people have higher levels of trust, such as Vietnam and New Zealand, have dealt far more effectively with the pandemic than the U.S., for instance, where trust levels have declined since the Reagan era.

Policy makers need to use such indicators much as physicians use their diagnostic tools. When some indicator is flashing yellow or red, it is time to look deeper. If inequality is high or increasing, it is important to know more: What aspects of inequality are getting worse?

STEERING THROUGH STORMS

Since we began our work on well-being indicators some dozen years ago, I have been amazed at the resonance that it has achieved. A focus on many of the elements of the dashboard has permeated policy making everywhere. Every three years the OECD hosts an international conference of nongovernmental organizations, national statisticians, government officials and academics furthering the “well-being” agenda, the most recent being in Korea in November 2018, with thousands of participants.

Whenever the conference next convenes, the global crisis in human societies that a microscopic virus has precipitated will surely be on the agenda. The full dimensions of it could take years or decades to become clear. Recovering from this calamity and steering complex societies through the even more devastating crises that loom—catastrophic climate change and biodiversity collapse—will require, at the very least, an excellent navigational system. To paraphrase the OECD: We have been developing the tools to help us drive better. It is time to use them.

Economics for Non Economists 3 – Explaining GDP and Economic Growth

By Girish Menon

Introduction

You will have recently read:

-     At 13%, Economist Intelligence Unit Pegs India's Growth In 2021 Higher Than IMF

-    Western economies recovering faster than expected from Covid, says IMF

 -   UK GDP rose 0.4% in February

 -  China's economy grows 18.3% in post-Covid comeback

 

What does this mean?

Just like the Forbes magazine compiles an annual list of the richest individuals on planet earth, most countries participate in an annual ‘show of wealth’. The most commonly used measure in this competition is called GDP. At the end of 2019 the top six countries were:

Table 1

Country	GDP ($ trillions)	Economic growth over previous year (%)	Per Capita GDP ($)	Share of World GDP (%)
USA	19.5	2.2	59, 939	24
China	12.2	6.9	8,612	15
Japan	4.9	1.7	38,214	6
Germany	3.7	2.2	44,680	4.5
India	2.7	6.7	1,980	3.28
UK	2.6	1.8	39.532	3,26

SourceWorldometers

What do these terms mean?

Simply defined, GDP or Gross Domestic Product is the money value of all goods and services (goods) produced within an economy in a period of time. In Table 1 the GDP is estimated over the year of 2019. The data quoted in the introduction compares GDP changes over the first two quarters of 2020.

Economic growth is a measure of the additional goods produced by an economy over the last period of time  (say a year or a quarter).

Per Capita GDP means the value of goods each resident would get if all goods produced in an economy is shared equally. This is calculated by dividing the GDP with the residents of the country. Do you think per capita GDP is an accurate description of how goods are actually distributed in an economy?

Share of World GDP means the share of global goods produced by an economy. This is calculated by dividing each country’s GDP with the whole world’s total GDP.

Why is GDP and the rate of Economic growth so important?

Materialism is the underlying principle of using GDP and economic growth as the most important indicator of economic performance. Materialism, according to the Cambridge English Dictionary, is the belief that having money and possessions is the most important thing in life. It follows that as one’s material goods increases one’s standard of living (happiness) tends to increase.

GDP is a tool that measures the volume of material goods produced by an economy. A high rate of economic growth demonstrates the rate at which the material goods in an economy is increasing and as a result the happiness of the residents as well. So, when the rate of economic growth becomes negative, as in the data mentioned in the introduction, it follows that your happiness will decrease.

Are GDP and GNP the same?

They are similar but not the same. GDP measures the volume of goods produced by people living within the boundaries of an economy. The output of Nissan’s Sunderland plant will be included in UK’s GDP. In other words the output of Britons and foreign nationals living in the UK will be added to calculate UK’s GDP.

GNP stands for Gross National Product. It is a measure of the volume of goods produced by British nationals living in the UK and outside. It will exclude the output of foreign nationals (say Nissan Sunderland) operating within the British economy.

Is GDP an accurate measure of the volume of goods produced within an economy?

The answer is No. The calculation is arduous and with questionable assumptions which I will not go into here. I will however mention some weaknesses here:

1. Even though there are some standardised procedures for its computation governments are known to deliberately intervene in its methodology and computation.

2.   Not all goods are included. For example if you clean your own house and look after your family – these services are not included. However, if you employ a cleaner, a cook, a nanny and a driver then their services are included.

3.   In some countries where there is a large informal economy. The goods produced by such activities are not be included in GDP computations.

Does an increase in GDP necessarily improve residents’ happiness?

In economics, happiness is better known as welfare.

If there is an earthquake in your country and many roads, buildings, bridges, stadia are destroyed. Then rebuilding them will increase the national GDP but has it improved the citizens’ welfare?

As a resultant of economic growth the quality of air you breathe has gone down and the water supply is polluted. Has this improved your standard of living?

Due to increased standard of living everybody has a car and you are now required to spend one hour extra in commuting time. Has this resulted in improved happiness?

What is the prognosis for GDP and economic growth?

It appears that due to Covid-19 the GDP of most nations will be lower than in 2019. These economies will have negative economic growth which means that in 2020 they will produce fewer goods than in 2019.

When the GDP falls, the terms most used are recession and depression. The difference between the two according to Harry Truman is ‘It's a recession when your neighbour loses his job; it's a depression when you lose yours’ .

As you have seen in the news, firms are busy firing staff which means there will be increased unemployment. Since more people are unemployed they will not have money to buy goods in the future and so there will be even less demand for goods in the future and those who have jobs today may lose their jobs next year in a downward spiral of negative economic growth begetting even more negative growth.

Will there be lower emphasis on GDP and economic growth in the future? For such a change to happen there needs a material change in organising the world economy. (If you wish to read further click here)

I hope it happens in my lifetime.

* - annualised rate

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A Class War like Never Seen Before?

A coronavirus vaccine could split America

In the battle between public science and anti-vaxxer sentiment, science is heavily outgunned writes Edward Luce in The FT

It is late October and Donald Trump has a surprise for you. Unlike the traditional pre-election shock — involving war or imminent terrorist attack — this revelation is about hope rather than fear. The “China virus” has been defeated thanks to the ingenuity of America’s president. The US has developed a vaccine that will be available to all citizens by the end of the year. Get online and book your jab.  

It is possible Mr Trump could sway a critical slice of voters with such a declaration. The bigger danger is that he would deepen America’s mistrust of science. A recent poll found that only half of Americans definitely plan to take a coronavirus vaccine. Other polls said that between a quarter and a third of the nation would never get inoculated. 

Whatever the true number, anti-vaccine campaigners are having a great pandemic — as indeed is Covid-19. At least three-quarters of the population would need to be vaccinated to reach herd immunity. 

Infectious diseases thrive on mistrust. It is hard to imagine a better Petri dish than today’s America. Some of the country’s “vaccine hesitancy” is well grounded. Regulators are under tremendous pressure to let big pharma shorten clinical trials. That could lead to mistakes. 

Vaccine nationalism is not just about rich governments pre-ordering as many vials as they can. It is also about winning unimaginably large bragging rights in the race to save the world. Cutting immunological corners could be dangerous to public health. 

Such caution accounts for many of those who would hesitate to be injected. The rest are captured by conspiracy theories. In the battle between public science and anti-vaxxer sentiment, science is heavily outgunned. It faces a rainbow coalition of metastasising folk suspicions on both the left and the right. Public health messages are little match for the memology of social media opponents. 

It is that mix of technological savvy and intellectual derangement that drives today’s politics. Mr Trump did not invent postmodern quackery — though he has endorsed some life-threatening remedies. The irony is that he could fall victim to the mistrust he has stoked.  

Should an effective vaccine loom into view before the US goes to the polls in 95 days, Mr Trump would not be the ideal person to inform the country. The story is as old as cry wolf. Having endorsed the use of disinfectants and hydroxychloroquine, Mr Trump has forfeited any credibility. Validation should come from Anthony Fauci, America’s top infectious-diseases expert, whose trust ratings are almost double those of the president he serves. 

Even then, however, the challenge would only just be starting. There is no cause to doubt the world-beating potential of US scientific research. There are good reasons to suspect the medical establishment’s ability to win over public opinion. 

The modern anti-vaxxer movement began on the left. It is still going strong. It follows the “my body is my temple” philosophy. Corporate science cannot be trusted to put healthy things into our bodies. The tendency for modern parents to award themselves overnight Wikipedia degrees in specialist fields is also to blame. 

Not all of this mistrust is madcap. African Americans have good reason to distrust public health following the postwar Tuskegee experiments in which hundreds were infected with syphilis and left to fester without penicillin. Polls show that more blacks than whites would refuse a coronavirus vaccine. Given their higher likelihood of exposure, such mistrust has tragic potential. 

But rightwing anti-vaxxers have greater momentum. America’s 19th century anti-vaccination movements drew equally from religious paranoia that vaccines were the work of the devil and a more general fear that liberty was under threat. Both strains have resurfaced in QAnon, the virtual cult that believes America is run by a satanic deep state that abuses children. 

It would be hard to invent a more unhinged account of how the world works. Yet Mr Trump has retweeted QAnon-friendly accounts more than 90 times since the pandemic began. Among QAnon’s other theories is that Covid-19 is a Dr Fauci-led hoax to sink Mr Trump’s chances of being re-elected. Science cannot emulate such imaginative forms of storytelling. 

All of which poses a migraine for the silent majority that would happily take the vaccine shots. Their lives are threatened both by a pandemic and by an infodemic. It is a bizarre feature of our times that the first looks easier to solve than the second. 

All marriages are arranged

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev in The Indian Express

Arranged marriage is a wrong terminology, because all marriages are arranged. By whom is the only question. Whether your parents or friends arranged it, or a commercial website or dating app arranged it, or you arranged it – anyway, it is an arrangement.

The idea that arranged marriage is some kind of a slavery – well that depends on whether there is exploitation. There are exploitative people everywhere. Sometimes, even your parents themselves may be exploitative – they may be doing things for their own reasons, like their prestige, their wealth, their nonsense.

Recently, someone asked me about choosing a girl for their boy. One girl is well-educated and pretty, but another girl had a wealthy father. They asked me which they should choose. So I asked a simple question, “Do you want to marry the girl or someone’s wealth?” It depends on what is your priority. If your priority is such that someone’s wealth by marriage becomes yours and that is all that matters to you, that is fine. Well, that is the kind of life you have chosen.

Arranged marriage and divorce rates

The success of something is in the result. Luxembourg, a small country which is held as one of the most economically prosperous and free societies, has a divorce rate of eighty-seven per cent. In Spain, the divorce rate is around sixty-five per cent; Russia is at fifty-one per cent; United States, forty-six per cent. India: 1.5 per cent. You decide which works best.

Well, people may say the divorce rate here is low due to the social stigma associated with divorce, but definitely how it is arranged is also an important factor. When parents are the basis of organising the marriage, the success rate is a little better because they will think more long term. You may just like the way a girl is dressed and you want to get married today. Well, tomorrow morning you could realise you don’t want to have anything to do with her! When you are twenty, due to various compulsions or peer pressure, you may take decisions which will not last a lifetime. But sometimes you really hit it off with someone and it may work out – that is another matter.

Everything is an arrangement. You may think so many things about it, but it is arranged by your emotion, your greed, or by someone. It is an arrangement. It is best that it is arranged by responsible, sensible people, by those who are most concerned about your wellbeing, who have a larger reach. You cannot find the best man or woman in the world because we do not know where they are! With the limited contacts that we have, we can arrange something that is reasonably good. That is all it is.

If a young man or young woman wants to marry, who will they marry? Their contacts are very limited. Within those ten people that they know in their life, you marry one guy or girl. Within three months you will know what it really is. But in most countries, there is a law: if you make a mistake, at least two years you must suffer before you can divorce. It is like a jail term. Well, many religions have fixed it that you cannot divorce, that it is completely wrong. But where such religions are practiced, there the divorce rate is highest. So, neither God’s diktats nor the law is able to stop the breakups.

When parents organise a marriage, their judgement may not be the best, but they generally have your best interests in mind. If you have matured beyond your parents’ judgement or prejudice, that is different – now you can make your own decisions.

Conducting your marriage responsibly

When I married I did not know my wife’s full name. I did not know her father’s name. I did not know her caste. When I told my father that I wanted to marry her, he said, “What? You don’t know her father’s name? You don’t know who they are, or what they are? How can you marry her?”

I said, “I’m only marrying her. I’m not planning to marry any of the other things that come with her. Just her. That’s it.” I was absolutely clear about her potential and what she will bring to me, and she was helplessly in love from the first moment.

Though I never took anyone’s advice in my life, there are always self-appointed advisors who said, “You’re making the biggest mistake in your life, this is going to be a disaster.”

I said, “Whatever happens, whichever way it happens, it is for me either to make it a disaster or a success.” I knew this much.

Because who you marry, how you marry, which way it was arranged or by whom it was arranged is not important. How responsibly you exist – that is all there is. How you arrange the marriage is your choice. I’m not saying this or that is the way, but whichever way you do it, please conduct it responsibly, joyfully. You need to understand to fulfil your needs, physical, psychological, emotional, social and various other needs, you are coming together. If you always remember, “To fulfil my needs, I’m with you,” then you will conduct this responsibly. Initially, you may be like that, but after some time, you think he or she needs you; then you will start acting wantonly and, of course, ugliness will start in many different ways.

This happened. A young man and a young woman got engaged. So once the ring was slid on her finger, the young woman said to him, “You can lean on me to share your pains, your struggles. Whatever sufferings you go through, you can always share them with me.”

The guy said, “Well, I don’t have any struggles or pains or problems.”

She said, “Well, we are not yet married.”

If you think you are full of pain, struggles, and problems and need someone to lean on, there will be trouble. You know, they have been saying, marriages are made in heaven, but you are cooking hell within you. If you think someone else is going to fix you then there will be trouble for you, and of course, unfortunate consequences for the other person. If you make yourself into a joyful, wonderful human being, then you will see, your work, home and marriage will all be wonderful. Everything will be wonderful because you are!