Weblinks for August 29

• Bowled over by Bollywood, an article in the Guardian (UK) about how Bollywood (India’s Bombay-centered Hindi movie industry), and Western television programs are leading people in Afghanistan to increasingly choose love marriages over arranged marriages.

• Who Partitioned India?: India Today looks at the various actors involved in the partition of India.

• Richard Stallman criticises the Spanish Wikipedia for disallowing links to rebelion.org, reports Noam Cohen in the Bits blog of the New York Times. He claimed that this was a political decision, but Spanish Wikipedia administrators contested that assertion, saying that the links were banned because rebelion.org is an aggregator and Wikipedia’s policy is to link to original news sources when possible.

• Are private schools charitable? A discussion centered around the United States: Felix Salmon, Matthew Yglesias, Conor Clarke,Adam Schaeffer.

• Picture worth a thousand words? Depictions of certain cartoons were removed by the Yale University Press from Jytte Klausen’s forthcoming book, The cartoons that shook the world. The New York Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education report. Statement issued by the Yale University Press.

• A study at the University of Chicago shows links between testosterone and women’s choice to enter careers in finance. The links seems to be stronger at lower levels than at higher levels of testosterone.

• The Free Software Foundation sends letters asking companies not to upgrade to the upcoming version of Windows, reports The Register (UK). It has sent letters to all the Fortune 500 companies except Microsoft.

• Talking of hair — the New York Times on hairstyles for black women (US-centric).

• Researchers in India call for more oversight to reduce and punish plagiarism, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Thoughts on human rights

With recent furore in India over the right to education bill and the recent moves in the United States towards “health care for all”, we hear arguments that the right to health care and the right to education are universal rights. So are the right to food, water, employment, reasonable living standards, good amenities, love, peace, security, freedom to pursue one’s hobbies, and many other things. Is there a flip side to this expansive view of human rights?

What can the flip side be? Essentially, the broader we consider the definition of a right, the less serious we make each right. Thus, introducing rights that are more and more peripheral crowds out the rights that we might argue are more basic.

We see different conceptions of rights in different constitutions and charters. Also, different terminology, such as “fundamental right”, “human right”, “natural right”.

For instance, the Constitution of India lists six fundamental rights, each having a number of parts. The six fundamental rights are right to equality (in the sense of equality before law, equality in matters of public employment, etc.), right to freedom, right against exploitation, right to freedom of religion, cultural and educational rights, and right to constitutional remedies. There is also a list of ten fundamental duties that includes strange duties such as “to strive towards excellence in all spheres of individual and collective activity so that the nation constantly rises to higher levels of endeavour and achievement” and also “to value and preserve the rich heritage of our composite culture”. We also have duties such as “to cherish and follow the noble ideals which inspired our national struggle for freedom” and “to abide by the Constitution and respect its ideals and institutions, the National Flag and the National Anthem”.

Weblinks for August 17

Some interesting stories over the past week:

• The Whole Foods controversy: Whole Foods John Mackey writes a piece in the Wall Street Journal titledThe Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare (August 11), discussing his views on health care and the direction of reform the United States should take. Olivia Jane at the Daily Kos urges viewers to sign a petition for boycotting Whole Foods products. Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek sums up the debate and links to other views.

• A fascinating piece by David Goldhill on health in the United States: The author makes a number of fascinating points.

• An interesting article on the self-contradictory transportation policy of the Obama adminitsration in the United States.

• The threat of swine flu grips India’s elite English-language newspapers, even as a hundred times that many people die of respiratory and infectious diseases. Swami takes this on in his Swaminomics column.

• Yet more evidence of the total lack of perspective of the Indian media: front-page coverage of the questioning of Bollywood icon Shahrukh Khan at Newark’s Liberty Airport in the United States. Chidambaram needs to step in. Shahrukh Khan’s distress is understandable, but as a TOI blogger himself points out, this is not exactly front-page news (doesn’t stop TOI, though). A fairly comprehensive summary is available in this blog post. Compare that to the New York Times coverage of India, where the top news headline is violence in Kashmir.

Weblinks for August 11

Some weblinks:

• Is the recession over? Over at the Becker-Posner blog, Becker offers one view while Posner offers another. Krugman is already congratulating the Obama administration, while Arnold Kling offers an interesting perspective.

• Amit Varma blasts Indian mainstream media for not putting tsunami alerts on their websites.

• Malcolm Gladwell on Atticus Finch and southern liberalism: For those of you who don’t know/remember, Atticus Finch is the lawyer for the black accused in To Kill A Mockingbird, a classic by Harper Lee.

• Sasa Vucinic talks at TED about investing in free press across the world.

• Paul Romer’s TED talk on charter cities: See also this blog post on charter cities.

• Socialism and school choice in India: A Cato@Liberty blog post by Swaminathan, saying that Indian legislation may create the world’s largest school choice experiment.

Some notes on “conspicuous consumption” and “people are stupid”

Thorstein Veblen, an economist-cum-sociologist working around 1890-1920, was responsible for coming up with the notion of “conspicuous consumption” — spending on goods and services with the purpose of establishing one’s income and wealth, conveying social status, impressing others, or causing envy. His work, The Theory of the Leisure Class, can be downloaded from Project Gutenberg.

In more recent times, economist Robert H. Frank, a New York Times columnist and professor at Cornell University, has argued strongly that a lot of goods are positional goods, whose value is determined primarily by what position one is in. Such goods lead to what are called “arms races” — people rush to stockpile more and more of these goods, thus leading to a waste of precious resources.

Similar ideas are found in the theory that education serves primarily a “screening” function — people go in for expensive higher education to prove to potential employers how smart they are to have managed to enter a higher educational institution and survive it, rather than for any intrinsic value such higher education is providing.

“Conspicuous consumption”, “positional good”, and “screening” are different but related ideas. They all share a common theme — a lot of wasteful and destructive expenditure is undertaken simply in order for people to establish their status or rank. Some might argue that this wasteful expenditure shows that “people are stupid” while others may argue that while individuals are making the best decisions given their circumstances, the system as a whole is stupid and wasteful.

Here is just a small sample of things that can be explained through this spectrum of theories:

• People eating too many unhealthy foods? Conspicuous consumption of food. Eating more food may be an indicator of higher status and societal position.

• People eating too little food? An arms race of getting thin in order to appear the most healthy and attractive person around.

• People getting bigger and bigger houses? Conspicuous consumption of housing. One’s house is an indicator of one’s social status, and a bigger house means a bigger social status.

• People traveling in private jets and private cars instead of planes and public transit? Conspicuous consumption of transportation.

• Poor people sending their kids to private schools instead of “free” public schools? Conspicuous consumption of schooling.

While I think there is some truth to both conspicuous consumption and arms race theories, there are a lot of caveats we need to keep in mind before readily applying such an explanation to any phenomenon we do not understand.

Weblinks for August 8

Since I don’t get much time to write longer posts, I’ve decided to put regular weblinks to blog posts, news articles, and new papers that I found interesting, with short commentary. Not all of these will be recent; some might be very old things that I’ve found recently.

• Samantha Power on a complicated hero: A TED talk by Samantha Power, head of Harvard’s Carr Center for Public Policy. She studies US international relations in the context of human rights, genocide, and war. Her talk, like her most recent book, is about Sergio Vieira de Mello, a UN diplomat who worked with the world’s worst dictators to help protect human rights. Power claims that in order to get national governments to speak out against genocide in other countries, the people of the nation must be sufficiently aware and make it a political issue. A particularly fascinating incident she narrates is of a genocide in the 1990s where people were more concerned about the extinction of gorillas due to the violence than about the death of people therein.

• Amartya Sen in an interview with Barkha Dutt on “My Idea of Justice” for NDTV, an Indian television-based news network (pointed out by Anirbit): I was very confused by the interview. Amartya Sen talks about the importance of “public reason” and “public argumentation” and public conceptions of morality and justice, and how this influences political action. Sen was the person who came up with the observation that democracies hardly ever have famines, regardless of their level of poverty. But, extreme situations apart, I see little evidence that public debate or public conceptions of ideas play a significant role in the sausage factory of political decision-making.

• The Boys Who Cried Racist, a blog post by a Cato Institute fellow in response to Paul Krugman’s piece in the New York Times making the bold assertion that the opposition to President Obama’s health care plan was disguised racism.

• Megan McArdle’s interview-cum-blog post on obesity seems to have attracted a lot of attention. Among other things, Mike The Mad Biologist pointed out that her way of bandying about heritability numbers was confusing and showed her ignorance (McArdle countered the second charge in a comment).

• An interesting article/blog post about competent elites. I think the author makes a lot of valid points, though I think the real question isn’t whether the elites are smarter than most other people (whether they are) but whether such smartness implies that more power in their hands would be better. After all, some things are just so complex (like: will this coin come heads or tails?) that the smartest people will do no better on them than the dumbest person who tosses another coin to get the answer.

• The White House’s “snitch” email. Reason TV has a response video.

• A fascinating Washington Post piece on the folks down on Main Street who’re getting hit by the recession (I learned about this from a Freakonomics blog post).

• The Getting Things Done President: The Big Money takes stock of President Obama. Is he falling prey to the trap of too much delegation to Congress in his hurry to get things done?

• Scholars take inspiration in discrimination: This article in the Chronicle of Higher Education talks about the pros and cons of scholars using their personal negative experiences (being at the receiving end of discrimination) to guide classroom discussions on the subject.

• Change? No change: The Hill reports that lobbying dollars in the United States have seen a boost with all the new dramatic legislation on health care reform health insurance reform and climate change legislation.

• The Opinionator Blog on the New York Times reports on yet another of the old media-new media stealing-attribution debate: Ian Shapira’s article on business coach Anne Loehr is liberally copied by gawker.com, and Shapira isn’t happy about it.