As the old song went, “when the giver gives, he tears the roof and gives”. Last week the Government of Karnataka released its report on the covid-19 serosurvey done in the state. You might recall that it had concluded that the number of cases had been undercounted by a factor of 40, but then some…
Election Counting Day
At the outset I must say that I’m deeply disappointed (based on the sources I’ve seen, mostly based on googling) with the reporting around the US presidential elections. For example, if I google, I get something like “Biden leads Trump 225-213”. At the outset, that seems like useful information. However, the “massive discretisation” of the…
Opinion polling in India and the US
(Relative) old-time readers of this blog might recall that in 2013-14 I wrote a column called “Election Metrics” for Mint, where I used data to analyse elections and everything else related to that. This being the election where Narendra Modi suddenly emerged as a spectacular winner, the hype was high. And I think a lot…
Distribution of political values
Through Baal on Twitter I found this “Political Compass” survey. I took it, and it said this is my “political compass”. Now, I’m not happy with the result. I mean, I’m okay with the average value where the red dot has been put for me, and I think that represents my political leanings rather well.…
Podcast on election forecasting
I recorded a podcast for Pragati on opinion polls, exit polls, election forecasting and all such. You can listen to it right here, or on the podcast page here. The Pragati Podcast is available on all major podcast apps.
Means, medians and power laws
Following the disbursement of Rs. 10 lakh by the Andhra Pradesh government for the family of each victim killed in the stampede on the Godavari last week, we did a small exercise to put a value on the life of an average Indian. The exercise itself is rather simple – you divide India’s GDP by its…
Time for bragging
So the Karnataka polls are done and dusted. The Congress will form the next government here and hopefully they won’t mess up. This post, however, is not about that. This is to stake claim on some personal bragging rights. 1. Back in March, after the results of the Urban Local Body polls came out, I…
The other side of the long tail
There are several people who talk about how the advent and the popularity of the internet has resulted in markets in many a long tail. Without loss of generality, let us just take the market for writing here. Several niches which were earlier not served since there wasn’t enough of a dedicated audience in a…
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…
Thank God for the economic crisis
This post is based on my discussion with Baada yesterday. I hereby acknowledge his contribution to this post. One of the hundred thousand random headlines that The HIndustan Times put on their front page during the last couple of weeks was a statement that China won’t hesitate to help out Pakistan in case India were…
The GS Report
I’m in the process of reading the Goldman Sachs report about what India should do to become a superpower by 2050. Have read some 4 pages of it so far.
Opportunity Costs
The concept of opportunity costs seems to be non-trivial, in the sense that most people don’t seem to get it. When I first learnt it as part of my Economics course at IIT Madras, I thought it was fairly common sense. However, looking around at a variety of people, it doesn’t seem to be that…
Fuel price hike
So petrol prices have gone up by a whopping 10%, and LPG by an even more whopping 16%. It’s quite ironical that the government, which in the name of the aam aadmi had rolled back a number of reforms has had to do this in the final year of its reign. They say that the…
On introducing democracy
Ravikiran Rao argues that the reasons most Indian parties are afraid to embrace inner party democracy is that the people who are in charge are afraid that if they introduce democracy and lose the first election, their opponent might destroy the democracy and just keep the power with himself. Isn’t this the case everywhere? Be…
Ministry Formation – my theory
So Yeddyurappa has been finally sworn in as the CM of Karnataka, this time hopefully for a longer period. Some 29 people have already been sworn in with him, leaving just four more slots (there is a limit of 34 on the size of the ministry). Trouble has already started brewing as some senior leaders…
Can I play with elasticity?
The government’s latest gimmick to keep petrol prices unrealistically low is to impose a special additional levy on income tax and corporate tax in order to finance the deficit. Basically a scheme to rob peter and pay paul. Make the higher-income guys pay for the excess oil consumption by the lower income guys.
Scrap the spending limit
There are two notable things regarding the ongoing elections in Karnataka. The first is the presence of a large number of real estate developers in the elections. The second is the virtual non-existence of corruption, rather the removal of it, in party manifestos. These two points, I believe, are not independent. Under the current system,…