I first came across Tim Harford when Tyler Cowen linked to his blog some six-seven months back. He used to blog fairly prolifically back then, and I used to enjoy reading it. In the matter of a couple of months, he had upstaged Tyler to become my favourite econ-blogger (that position currently belongs to Arnold Kling of EconLog). I wasn’t long before I bought “The Undercover Economist“.
Author: SK
Now it’s the turn of the economists
To fear the engineers that is. It seems like TCA Srinivasa Raghavan had an extremely tight deadline with respect to his analysis of the Raghuram Rajan Report. So, instead of taking on the report, he decides to go after the chief author instead. And he doesn’t even do a good job of this. He goes after the chief author’s educational background (Raghuram is a BTech (elec) from IITD). And proceeds to say that the invasion of engineers into economics has in a way ruined the subject.
touring
i think i’m going to have some free time in the first week of may. i used to have this plan of randomly touring karnataka. and despite the heat, i think this would be a good time to do it. also, given that it’s election time, I think i can get lots more insights from my proposed tour.
i hope i can get someone to sponsor this trip. in return i’ll blog about it for them, and write maybe three articles per day about my travels and insights. Hell, I’ll be doing a grassroot level election coverage for them! So I’ll definitely be adding valoo.
i wonder how to approach this problem. can someone please suggest?
Tracking your portfolio
Another amazing insight from fooled by randomness. The essence of this is that if you are a passive investor, the more often you track your portfolio, the more your headache. Suppose you have invested in a portfolio where the expected annual return is R%, and the volatility is V%. The insight is that the more often you track your portfolio, the likelihood of the portfolio delivering a positive return between two observations falls extremely quickly.
Accountants and Engineers
I’m currently reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Fooled by randomness. Have read some fifty pages so far. Like his later book The Black Swan, this too contains totally awesome fundaes. And contrary to reports that I’ve heard, it’s extremely easy reading. Either it’s because of my familiarity with derivatives or because I’m just coming off Chaos by James Gleick, which I found extremely difficult to read, and struggled to finish.
BJP in Bangalore North – Karnataka elections coverage part four
Looking around the whitefield-krishnarajapuram area, one gets the feeling that the BJP is strong in these parts. The area is dotted with advertisements by the party, and the local party office is also quite prominent. No other party has any sort of visible presence here, and considering that this area is semi-urban and has a large number of Reddys (that I figure out by the names of the leaders, etc.) I would classify this area as a BJP stronghold.
Continue reading “BJP in Bangalore North – Karnataka elections coverage part four”
BJP in Bangalore part two – Karnataka elections coverage part three
“Bangalore South is not as Brahmin-dominated as you think”, Rajeev Gowda had told me about two years back. “There are an equal number of Vokkaligas here. So I do have good chances of winning”. Unfortunately for Prof. Gowda, Basavanagudi, where he lives, is currently represented by former mayor K Chandrashekar, another Congress Vokkaliga.
Continue reading “BJP in Bangalore part two – Karnataka elections coverage part three”
The BJP in Bangalore – election coverage part two
If reports earlier in the day by TV 9 are to be believed, the BJP has finalised its candidates for the 28 constituencies in Bangalore. On the whole, they seem to have done a decent job of it, though it was widely reported that there was a lot of infighting and lobbying. The chief cause for concern, however, is that a number of realtors have been given tickets.
Continue reading “The BJP in Bangalore – election coverage part two”
Karnataka Elections: Part 1 – Redrawing Constituencies
Starting today, i hope to write a series of posts on my blog covering the Karnataka elections, which are scheduled to be held on May 10, 16 and 22. What makes this elections more interesting is that they are going to be held according to new constituencies which were drawn up by the Justice Kuldip Singh Commission. The Congress tried to push the elections to November, claiming that it would take time to prepare the new rolls. However, the EC figured that they would be able to hold the elections before May 28 – which is 6 months after the last assembly got dissolved, so elections will be held next month.
Continue reading “Karnataka Elections: Part 1 – Redrawing Constituencies”
Predictably irrational traffic
There have been several experiments where they test the behaviour of people with respect to fairness. A popular test is that person A is given 100 rupees to divide among himself and person B. Now, B can either accept this division, in which case both get the amounts that A proposed, or he can reject it, in which case both get nothing.
Logically, even if B is paid 1 rupee, he should accept it since he’s better off with the rupee rather than without. However, numerous studies have shown that B rejects the division when he thinks it is “unfair”.
Saw a version of this yesterday. Typically at busy intersections, you would do well to follow the rules and wait for the green light. The cost of the wait is typically less than the cost of a potential jam (there’s a limiting case wrt traffic, of course; hence you see that there are more signal jumps when traffic is thin). However, it seems like fairness is important.
It was fantastic to watch, and even participate in it though I knew what I was doing was wrong. West had waited for five minutes at the intersection (a long time by that intersection standards) and when the policeman decided to ignore them to give Green for a second consecutive time to south, the barrier breached. As if acting on a cue, everyone on the west side breached the signal and caused a traffic jam.
It was fantastic. People were really patient for the first few minutes of the signal. No one even attempted to jump it. The policeman, they thought, was doing his job and they did theirs. After the jam been caused, once again, people were remarkably behaved and listened to the policeman as he helped clear the jam. It was only when the policeman acted “unfairly” that they didn’t behave. It was as if at that moment the crowd had lost trust in the signal system and decided to breach.
I ultimately ended up spending some 20 minutes at the intersection (i was part of the side that was “unfairly treated”).
Let me know if you have observed anything else that is similar.