Will Israel Attack Iran?

Yes and soon–in 2012 itself–if you believe New York Times:

After speaking with many senior Israeli leaders and chiefs of the military and the intelligence, I have come to believe that Israel will indeed strike Iran in 2012.

Two thoughts:

One, what will happen to oil prices and the world economy if Israel indeed attacks Iran?

Two, we can only imagine the diplomatic pressure on India (and China) to reduce oil imports from Iran. India and China are two major importers of Iranian oil who have refused to curtail purchases from Iran after the recent sanctions by the US and the EU. Indian policy makers have little wiggle room to sustain economic growth if a big shock hits the world economy.

An excellent article on future of education by Prof. Larry Summers

Excerpt:

A good rule of thumb for many things in life holds that things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then happen faster than you thought they could….Here is a bet and a hope that the next quarter century will see more change in higher education than the last three combined.

Here is the Link

Trivia…

Cricketer and MP Navjot Singh Siddhu is maaried to, yes this is true, Dr. Navjot Siddhu. She is a gynecologist and is contesting assembly election this year from Amritsar (east) on a BJP ticket.

Read somewhere today…

“Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.”
–Blaise Pascal

More on UID…

According to this article in Hindustan Times,  Mr. P. Chidambaram, home minister in Government of India wants government officials to take over the job of UID implementation because he believes that non-citizens are getting UID cards under the current system. If this is Mr. Chidambaram’s reason for blocking further work on UID, then he is being disingenuous. It is hard to believe that any government agency can implement UID with greater reliability. While it certainly has all the incentive to issue fake IDs, what additional resources does the government machinery have to improve the reliability of the system?

Mr. Home Minister will you please explain yourself outside the closed-door cabinet meetings too? We are all ears.

What Vivekanand Valued: Pratap Bhanu Mehta

What a brilliant article by Pratap Bhanu Mehta! His op-eds should be used in school and college curriculums.

Letter from a Birmingham Jail: Martin Luther King, Jr.

Today is Martin Luther King Day in the US. Today is not King’s birthday; he was born on 15th January. But America celebrates MLK day on 3rd Monday of January, irrespective of the date.

King was a powerful speaker and a great writer. It is hard not to be moved by his writing. On his 83rd birthday, I am posting link to my favorite King’s writing: his letter from a Birmingham Jail. 

“School is the fiercest thing you can come up against. Factories ain’t no cinch, but schools is worst.”

Test after test shows that kids in developing countries hardly learn anything (useful) even after spending years in school. Then does it make sense to force them into school using conditional cash transfer? Asks Prof. Lant Pritchett in this very interesting blog.

Some excerpts:

Data from the 2005 India Human Development Survey (Desai, Dubey, Vanneman, and Banerji 2008) show that 29 percent of parents report their child was “beaten or pinched” in government schools in the previous month. Worse, a child from the poorest group of households is almost twice as likely to be beaten or pinched in a government school than a child from the richest group of households. This is in contrast to private schools which show no income favoritism in beating.

…if somehow UP in 2009 had been able to replace its regular teachers making around 11,000 rupees a month with contract teachers working for 3000 rupees a month that UP could have saved more than a billion dollars… This replacement of regular with contract teachers would appear to double child learning per year as the estimated “contract teacher” impact on learning… is roughly the same as an additional year with a regular teacher.

 

Prof. Lant Pritchett is one of the most interesting economists of our time, and somewhat controversial too. He wrote the toxic World Bank memo commonly attributed to Larry Summers. Summers just signed it as the Chief Economist of the Bank.

Prof. Pritchett has a cock-eyed view on most development issues. For example, he is not that excited about universal schooling. Check out his forthcoming book, The Rebirth of Education: From Universal Schooling to Universal Learning, for his views on this issue.

Nor does he share his fellow economists’s enthusiasm for conditional cash transfer (CCT).

“Adding conditionality to cash transfer is good politics..”.

It many not be good economics though.

The genius of the CCTs in Mexico and in Brazil was not about how to get kids in school…Many of these transfers were conditioned on the enrollment of children in age groups with near-universal enrollment. (In Brazil in 2001, for example, enrollment at ages 9–12 exceeded 95%.).

 

 

 

Only in Ulta Pradesh (UP)

From the Outlook:

From Lucknow to Benares and further on towards the region known as Purvanchal, a strange rumour spread on the night of January 2: all those who sleep through the night will turn into stone by dawn. Children were forced awake, adults stepped out of their homes in the bitter cold, shops were opened to sell haldi and geru (a red powder), the rubbing of which on the body was believed to avert the strange phenomenon. Through SMS and word of mouth, people were told to recite the Hanuman Chalisa; many did, as rumours of an earthquake and other impending disasters also spread.

 

UID, the Magic Number: The Economist

After enrolling nearly 200 million Indians in last one year, the UID scheme is facing some rough weather now. A few weeks ago, I had written about a Parliamentary Committee’s objections to the UID project and its allegedly shoddy implementation. The home minister of India, Mr. P. Chidambaram, is blocking the extension of the scheme for security reasons. Many activists and parliamentarians oppose it for the threat to privacy it poses and the fear that those left out by the voluntary enrollment process will be even worse-off than they are now without any government identity.

The Economist, however, is gun-ho about UID. They think the potential benefits far outweigh the objections even when the objections are valid. They want other developing countries to emulate UID and the way it is being implemented.