My learning…………….

I was not sure who will teach me what, how and why in my life in the past in even now. Why I am saying means I read an excellent piece in India-Seminar which bring some interesting questions and thoughts in “learning, edification, adult, child etc”. 

For example consider Sonia Kadyan article: 

• “Throughout my education, the only thing missing was learning. I didn’t know where its limits might start. Maybe we learn to gain praise and appreciation from adults or to show-off to fellow learners. It may include the knowledge of everything, but from an adults’ perspective. 
  
• I truly believe that the only place where one learns nothing is the school, and even if one does learn something there, it will be questioned sometime in the future,  
  
• After schooling, whenever I was at a social gatherings, I simply stood silently, waiting to be commanded because that was what I had learnt in my school, i.e., to shut my mouth, do as I was told, and not use my brain. 
  
• I don’t think that one can be such a bad learner that one fails to learn even 33 per cent of what is taught in 365 days and may fail again if given one more span of 365 days to learn it again. Surely it makes one doubt the things required to be learnt and definitely the person involved in teaching it. It is not a child’s fault if she frequently fails to learn a concept, totally alien and meaningless to her. 
  
• I was permitted by the school authorities to go and sit in room number 8, class I-B, roll number 37. I was handed over to some adults called ‘teachers’ who appeared to be mentally and physically sound. I had to call them ‘madam’ or ‘sir’ depending on their voice and the kind of clothes they wore, though they had the right to call me the way they pleased. I had to respect them no matter how much they humiliated me. 
  
• Going to school, carrying all the knowledge tools in my bag, still remains a mystery to me. I wonder why I had to go to school if all I had to learn was in my school bag itself. Teachers simply read to us from books and took tests; wasn’t this something any child can do once she masters literacy skills? As far as comprehension and implication of a concept are concerned, these were never valued by any teacher. 
  
• Everything was funny and strange at school, like eating only when the bell sounded, opening a book to read a piece of given knowledge only when the clock said or the teacher demanded. Some of my classmates would cry hard, wanting to go back home as if they had come to school at the cost of their ongoing top secret inventions. I disliked those long assemblies in the morning. I remember sweating profusely, about to faint on a hot morning, still praying, eyes closed, to someone whom I had never known and whenever I opened my eyes I found the teachers standing by as if I had just finished worshipping them. After one week, my actual class teacher came to me, held my ear and pulled me to I-B, shouting that it was there that I was supposed to sit and learn. 
  
• Then began my journey to be an ‘ideal student’. An ideal student is one who listens the most, questions the least, and never shows individuality.......... 
  
• All I did was to wake up early at the cost of my wonderful dreams and thoughtful imagination, walk into a scary building, sit there, stuck to the place allotted, continuously staring at the teacher in order to convey that I was listening to the nonsense syllabus articulated by her. I would sit there for six hours, six days a week, waiting with all concentration for the last long bell that would convey the end of yet another dull part of the day. 
  
• How could I risk my life simply to know the school building fully, when every time one tried, one faced the highest probability of meeting a heartless devil given charge of keeping children inside their allotted cells?.......... 
  
• Recess used to be the most threatening time of the day when adults went out of sight, to their caves, leaving children free to be on their own. This was the time when students, who pretended to be passive, adult-operated machines became active and alive – leaders, followers, enemies, explorers and social workers. I hated recess as it required me to show off my hidden potential to amaze other children and gain entry into their world. But how could I betray the adults? I chose to follow them and preferred sitting motionless at my place. I was practicing to turn myself into a mindless robot working on their demand. 
  
• In the very first grade I was made to believe in my inability to do anything on my own. There I found out that there is one teacher while there are forty students; the teacher can’t possibly give time to all of them but all forty students must give all their time and everything to that teacher. 
  
• Once my Hindi teacher asked us if we could recall all the Hindi consonants in the right order. At once I looked at the floor, hoping that she wouldn’t see me. I was lucky as her eyes fell on a boy. What a brave boy he was; he questioned her if she herself knew all the consonants. This was enough to bring out the devil in her. All she could think of in retaliation was to shout and punishing him for having dared to question her knowledge. In the end she left us speechless by reciting all the Hindi consonants in the exact order. I wonder why it matters if one can utter the alphabets in the correct order or even know them while one is not allowed to speak one’s mind, think what one wants, or say what one feels”. 
  

PS: I have never carried a bag, water bottle, even some time the authorised books, no uniform but walked 20 Km daily up and down by side seeing the farm field, mountain, men at work, cattle field till grade 12 with my mind. But I was asking myself what is the purpose of learning, why one should learn all which are learned by adult, etc. It took another few years to understand these questions.

Never thank an economist.........

In 2005, I bought the book of Professor Amartya Sen’s “The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity” but never crossed beyond the introduction for no reasons but for his muddled arguments which I read (reading even now) elsewhere. But I have read Mr Ramchandra Guha’s review with interest in the Economic and Political Weekly, October 8-14, 2005. 

Now there is one more review by Lalit Deshpande who writes:

• “I was quite intrigued by the reactions of several friends of mine to The Argumentative Indian. Many had started reading it but only a few could sustain their interest to the end. Those who, having started it, kept it away .for later reading found it repetitive and often detailing arguments too familiar to be rehearsed by a laurite. While some repetition was unavoidable, given the nature of the book, I should hate to think that the disappointment of my friends was widely shared. 
  
• Guha describes Sen as a Bengali cosmopolitan, Indian liberal, left-wing democrat and a broad-minded economist. I wouldn.t be surprised if, armed with Guha.s certification and Sen.s defence of multiple identities, some member of the SP (a flock of birds with saffron feathers), suspending temporarily his participation in the construction of the Temple, rushed to Harvard to put Sen on a head-shrinker.s couch for multiple personality disorder!” 
  

I have no doubt I will not read Lalit’s 17 page review titled “Thank You, Professor Sen” in the Indian Journal of Human Development, Vol. 1, No. 2, 2007

Professor who don’t Self-update their knowledge are “walking dead bodies”

Again it is not surprise to me at least, when I was student of economics in Madras University my guiding professor teaches a subject ‘Economic Growth and Development’. Unfortunately, he could not teach us about why and how Professor B R Shenoy wrote a ‘dissent note’ to the second five year plan of India. What was his macro view of Indian economy at that time and what he had suggested? 

In another interaction I asked my professor who did not Indian economics professor were not aware of different ideas like the one Austrian Economics, for instance? His answer was “different ideas exist in different part of the world”. So simply he managed to escape the situation. 

I asked one of my professor who taught statistics for economists in our undergraduate course, did he ever heard about Austrian Economics his answer was “yes” but never taught us about those people’s ideas and contribution. The other reason that he told us was that these ideas was not part of our syllabus. 

In the course we were forced to learn all kind of muddled socialism. The terrible is it still prolongs in every department of economics in India.

Mr S. S. TARAPORE who was in RBI and writes in today’s Business Line newspaper. “In India, we have scant interest in economic history and thereby are unable to learn from the mistakes of the past”…… and “most Indian economists would be unaware of this important report.”  

My other professor who taught us public finance used to asks us whether we read newspaper daily or not. When we don’t he simply called us “walking dead bodies”. Somehow I applied this logic to a few professors in the department who never ever wrote a research paper during their 20-30 year professor career. This is only one example think of hundred of universities around the country.  

Professor Manoj Pant is wrong….

Yes it is not surprise as he is a professor in JNU.

Prof Manoj writes in today’s ET “The world is contracting in real terms and it is time to read John Maynard Keynes not Milton Friedman.” 

But he forgets to read what Prof F A Hayek and others have said for example Mr DICK ARMEY wrote in a recent article in WSJ: 

"In the long run, we are all dead," John Maynard Keynes once quipped. An influential British economist, Keynes used the line to dodge the problematic long-term implications of his policy proposals. His analysis of the Great Depression redefined economics in the 1930s and asserted that increased government spending during a downturn could revive the economy. 

President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats (very few of whom likely have read Keynes's 1936 book "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money") have dug up the dead economist's convenient justification for deficit spending in defense of their bloated stimulus legislation. But none ask the most important question: Was Keynes right? 

According to Nobel economist Friedrich Hayek, a contemporary of Keynes and perhaps his greatest critic, Keynes "was guided by one central idea . . . that general employment was always positively correlated with the aggregate demand for consumer goods." Keynes argued that government should intervene in the economy to maintain aggregate demand and full employment, with the goal of smoothing out business cycles. During recessions, he asserted, government should borrow money and spend it. 

Keynes's thinking was a decisive departure from classical economics, because arbitrary "macro" constructs like aggregate demand had no basis in the microeconomic science of human action. As Hayek observed, "some of the most orthodox disciples of Keynes appear consistently to have thrown overboard all the traditional theory of price determination and of distribution, all that used to be the backbone of economic theory, and in consequence, in my opinion, to have ceased to understand any economics." 

A father of public choice economics, Nobel laureate James Buchanan, argues that the great flaw in Keynesianism is that it ignores the obvious, self-interested incentives of government actors implementing fiscal policy and creates intellectual cover for what would otherwise be viewed as self-serving and irresponsible behavior by politicians. It is also very difficult to turn off the spigot in better economic times, and Keynes blithely ignored the long-term effects of financing an expanded deficit."

Good life for new president………….

Christopher Lingle says in the Korea Times “there is the elephant in the room that nobody wants to notice: rising price inflation. But myth making about this being a redux of the Great Depression induces the Federal Reserve to orient monetary policy toward warding off deflation. 

But this is not your grandfather's recession. It is more like the one conjured up by Jimmy Carter. In a single term of office, President Carter oversaw double-digit inflation, double-digit unemployment, double-digit interest rates, shrinking incomes and increasing poverty. ”

Dangerous Centrist……..

In the course of learning good economics person like me often handicapped by all left, right, and centrist… 

So let’s try to be no part of any “ist”. It does not mean that the difficulty of learning good economics is over. 

When we enter school we often preached “be honest, never be a rude to any one even to animal (some extent), always say truth, etc. 

These slogans slowly become never in any part of student life in Indian colleges and universities. 

The person who never seen the colleges and universities wall no doubt is in peril at the spicy politics of criminals but less of good men. 

Max Veber once wrote a piece in which he described quite interestingly “politics is vacation” often for unemployed youths! 

So no surprise the other part of a persons life is often illustrated in the newspapers, TV etc. No wonder there is a dangerous academic life for many satirist who never knew the full subject knowledge but somehow knew how to play the politics gamble in the inside four walls of “class room”. 

Lets see what one academician says (forget how dangerous he and his ideas. Paul Samuelson often credited for his classic textbook of Economics with “much gloom and doom”) about present financial crisis. He says “….famous Austrian, Friedrich Hayek, then resident in the UK, earned perpetual guilt for similar insistence on limiting any expansion of credit during the 1931 deflation. It is reported that, in a London seminar deep in the Depression, J.M. Keynes’ young associate, Richard Kahn, asked Hayek: “Do you mean that if I borrow a pound from you and spend it on consumption, I am making the depression worse?” Hayek replied: “Yes, and it is very complicated to explain why.” But it is easy to explain why Hayek’s reputation as a macroeconomist collapsed.” 

Mind you, he has not said about what caused the present crisis. 

It is relevant to cite from a banker turned economics journalist, in today’s ET titled as “When practice doesn’t make perfect’”. This is answer to Mr Paul dangerous centralist preach of one side economics.

Far from realising stage…………..

Economist Meghnad Desai says Chacha “Manmohan Singh began the new economic policy in 1991 and lifted India out of the old Mahalanobis nightmare.” And “There were doubters at that time whether liberal economic reforms would work or whether India would be signing itself for a new slavery or get trapped in a debt-default saga. None of these happened, and India began a regime of growth rates which never went below 5 per cent when, in the previous 45 years, they had rarely been above.” 

It is not “there were doubters at that time whether liberal economic reforms would work” or not. The same sentiments prevails every economics department in Indian university even today. When will these folks give up their dogmatic marching towards “old Mahalanobis nightmare”.