Out on Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok has an excellent post on why “sexism and racism will never diminish“, even when people on the whole become less sexist and racist. The basic idea is that there is always a frontier – even when we all become less sexist or racist, there will be people who will…
Freelancing and transaction costs
In the six years of running my own consulting business, I’d forgotten about an essential part that you need to endure as part of a job – piecemeal work. It is fairly often when you’re working for someone else that you get work that is so tiny or insignificant that you can hardly take ownership…
Brainstorming
I was never a big fan of “brainstorming”. I’m referring to those meetings where everyone gets together and thinks aloud, in order to converge to a solution. In the past, when I’ve been involved in such exercises, they’ve mostly come to nothing, and mostly ended with a list of to-dos which got never done (this…
Weak ties and job hunting
As the more perceptive of you would have figured out by now, the wife is in her first year of business school, and looking for an internship. I’m at a life stage where I have friends in most companies she is interested in who are in roles that are at a level where it is…
Generalists and specialists
So you have generalists and specialists. Generalists are fundamentally smart people who can do a variety of things. They take a look at a problem, take some time to understand the basics, and then go about solving it. They get bored easily, and move from problem to problem. Generally, they don’t dig deep but are…
In search of uncertainty
Back when I was in school, I was a math stud. At least people around me thought so. I knew I wanted to pursue a career in science, and that in part led me to taking science in class XI, and subsequently writing JEE which led to the path I ultimately took. Around the same…
Comparative advantage and competitive advantage
So there are two reasons why you could be employed. Comparative advantage and competitive advantage. Let me explain. In international trade, there is a concept called “law of comparative advantage“. Let me explain with the classical (and simple) example. Robinson Crusoe is marooned on an island with Friday. Now, let us assume there are two…
Successful IPOs
Check out this article in the Wall Street Journal. Read the headline. Does this sound right to you? MakeMyTrip Opens Up 57% Post-IPO; May Be Year’s Best Deal It doesn’t, to me. How in the world is the IPO successful if it has opened 57% higher in the first hour (it ended the first day…
Barista Update
The Barista at Barton Center on MG Road has suddenly become so much more bearable, as they have turned down the volume of their music to a level such that you can actually have conversation without shouting. On a related note, it seems much easier to find tables there compared to earlier (yesterday we walked…
Valuation of Parking Space
There’s a unique problem in my apartment building – the building has been built with provision for only seven parking slots in the basement but each of the nine houses here has been allotted a slot, which means there are two obstructing slots. Unfortunately, my slot is at a location where I get blocked by…
Kabaddi and Jesus Navas
I’ve always talked about the Kabaddi style of solving a problem. In Kabaddi, when you are defending, six out of the seven players in the team form a chain in order to encircle the attacker. The seventh defender, however, strikes it alone, in a different direction, trying to draw the attacker into a position where…
Orange Juice and Petrol
So I was reading this article by Ajay Shah about administered pricing for petroleum. He does an excellent (though it gets a bit technical in terms of statistics) analysis about what could go wrong if the government were to free pricing of petroleum products. He mostly argues in favour of deregulation, and that is a…
Urban living and restaurants and liquidity
Last night I had dinner at Alfanoose, a small Mediterranean joint off Broadway. I had hummus and salad with pita bread, and had also brought along a falafel sandwich which is now sitting in my fridge and is likely to get consumed today for breakfast. Excellent stuff. Absolutely brilliant. And not expensive at all –…
A Balance Sheet View of Life
The basic idea of this post is that interpersonal relationships (not necessarily romantic) need to be treated as balance sheets and not as P&L statements, i.e. one should always judge based on the overall all-time aggregate rather than the last incremental change in situation. Just to give you a quick overview of accounting, the annual…
Tranche of wallet
One of the buzzwords in marketing in the last few years has been “share of wallet”. “We don’t aim for market share in any particular segment”, they say. “What we are aiming for is a larger portion of the customer’s share of wallet”. Basically what marketers try to do is to design their products such…
Theory of comparative advantage and chutiya kaam
Suppose you and me together have to do two tasks A and B. We need to decide who does what (let’s assume that we need to pick one task each). Now I’m a stud and you are a chutiya so I’m better than you at both A and B. So how do we split? It…
Cooking
I’m in the process of my weekly cooking. I’m making onion and potato sambar which should last me for about four meals – one tonight, and for three meals during the course of this week. I have been on and off the phone to my mother, as she has been giving out expert instructions from…
Taleb’s Recipe
No, unlike the previous post, this has nothing to do about food. It is about Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s recent op-ed in the Financial Times where he gives his “recipe” for saving the global financial system. Two of my favourite bloggers Arnold Kling and Felix Salmon have responded to it, but I didn’t like either so…
Intellectual Property
A blog post earlier this month on Econlog finished off with a very strong quote by Friedrich Hayek: One of the forms of private property that people cherish most is their ideas. If you convince them that their ideas are wrong, you have caused them to suffer a capital loss. I ended up liking it…
Why is Ten Sports sitting on so many rights?
I wanted to stay up last night. I wanted to stay up and watch the WI-Eng match till the very end. Waking up this morning and checking the scorecard, it seems like it was a really good match. And Fidel Edwards seems to have become a last-day-shutdown specialist. This is the second time this series…
Car Ownership
People, especially in the US, make a big deal about home ownership. In fact a large part of the current economic meltdown has its roots in the American craze for home ownership. Fannie and Freddie were created to help home loans become cheaper, then there was the CDO wave. Then came subprime. NINJA (no income…