Steve Keen is off to walk: (more…)

Good to see the ‘Nobel’ Prize going to a ‘non-economist’..Elinor Ostrom is a political scientist. (more…)

Just saw a twitter link by Mark Thoma for a solar powered garbage compactor

and I thought..this is JUST what we need! When we were writing the Demand Curve piece on North India, I was a bit taken aback when I read Laveesh had written ‘Kanpur, north India’s industrial hub at one point, has now become a big garbage dump’, I thought that was a bit severe and thought I should tone it down a bit, but when I surfed to crosscheck this, I found the Municipal Commissioner of Kanpur calling it the dirtiest town in Uttar Pradesh!

All of urban India is turning into garbage dumps, actually, and hardly anything seems to be happening on that front. Though the Supreme Court has passed a ruling asking for segregation of garbage, for instance in Pune, action is zilch…I find this amazing piece from the TOI from 2005 talking of the PMC making wealth from waste…needless to say, the ground reality is nothing like that reported.

In early days of Indicus,..2001?.., Laveesh and Peeyush had done a paper on private and public garbage removal, which I cant find online anymore. But whether removal is private or public, enforcement of anti-littering laws will have to be public sector and a sense amongst residents of the need to be clean. But on both counts I am not too hopeful.

Got a mail yesterday from Suyodh about an article in NYT debunking the Peak Oil theory. As a risk analyst looking at Economy, Ecology and Energy, his comments below are enlightening to get a perspective on how humans perceive risk. (more…)

Questioning the dismal science has so many interesting posts from economists..here is Mark Thoma on asking the right questions, which reiterates my view on the need for pluralism in economics