THINKING ABOUT THE POOR II – REVIEW OF SHAH AND MANDAVA'S "LAW, LIBERTY AND LIVELIHOOD"

In a previous blog post, I had concluded based on the randomized control trials (RCTs) carried out by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo and others (and summarized in Banerjee and Duflo's Poor Economics (2011)) that the "trickle-down" effect is probably not valid when we look at the very poor and that some paternalistic interventionism might be justified.

Here, in this article, which can be construed as a continuation of the earlier one, I wish to discuss further why the trickle-down effect fails to work. To do this we need to bring in a legal dimension that Banerjee and Duflo's work lacks. This dimension is well brought out in Parth J Shah and Naveen Mandava's edited book Law, Liberty and Livelihood: Making a Living on the Street (2005).

THINKING ABOUT THE POOR – REVIEW OF BANERJEE AND DUFLO’S “POOR ECONOMICS”

E M Forster once wrote, “We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.”

While I am of the opinion that capitalism works well for most of society, can it really touch the very poor and destitute? To be sure, there are books like C K Prahalad’s The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (2004) which discuss how firms and corporations can reach out to address the needs of the poor and reap profits for themselves but that didn’t seem to be the complete answer.

Here I wish to talk about a handful of people who have looked at the face of poverty unflinchingly and come up with answers to whether capitalism actually works at the lowest rungs of society.

GOING TOO FAST - REVIEW OF THOMAS L FRIEDMAN'S "THANK YOU FOR BEING LATE"

Towards the end of his book Thank You For Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations (2016) noted journalist Thomas L Friedman states: "I am a socially liberal, deeply patriotic, pluralism-loving, community-oriented, fiscally moderate, free-trade-inclined, innovation-obsessed environmentalist-capitalist." Now that is a statement after my own heart! This is a kind of human being I could aspire to be!

TWO BOOKS ON EDUCATION - REVIEW OF "DISRUPTING CLASS" AND "BLENDED"

Clayton M Christensen, professor at Harvard Business School, shot to prominence with his book The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (1997). In this book he first came up with the concept of "disruptive innovation" which has proved very influential in understanding business and technological trends.

A disruptive innovation is an innovation that creates a new market and eventually disrupts an existing market displacing established firms in the process.

ECONOMICS FOR CHILDREN - REVIEW OF ROOPA PAI'S "SO YOU WANT TO KNOW ABOUT ECONOMICS"

A few days ago, I took my son to a children's book fair in his school. Amongst the colourful collection of Geronimo Stiltons, Captain Underpants, Wimpy Kids and Nancy Drews, one book caught my attention. It was titled So You Want to Know About Economics (2017) by an author I had not previously heard of, Roopa Pai.

THE RIGHT VIEW OF ECONOMICS - REVIEW OF SCHIFF AND SCHIFF'S "HOW AN ECONOMY GROWS AND WHY IT CRASHES"

About a couple of years ago, I saw a YouTube video entitled How the Economic Machine Works by billionaire hedge fund manager Ray Dalio (see video here). Dalio's vision of the economy left me nonplussed. He seemed to be saying that spending drives the economy and that the central banks could effectively bring us out of recessions by manipulating interest rates.

AN INDICTMENT OF COMMUNISM - REVIEW OF ARCHIE BROWN'S "THE RISE AND FALL OF COMMUNISM"

Archie Brown, a British political scientist and historian and emeritus professor at University of Oxford had been studying Communism for forty five years before he started to write the massive The Rise and Fall of Communism (2010) which won the 2010 W. J. M. Mackenzie Prize for Best Political Science Book of the Year.