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Showing posts from January, 2022

Times of inflation

There is debate among economists, politicians, commentators and various experts about rising inflation in America and other countries of the world (we in India also have inflation problem). In America, there are various theories out there on inflation among various groups. A group, lets call them inflationists, says US spent too much in too little time which caused inflation (read 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ). This group says that to stop wage-spiral crisis (coming in near future), we have to use blunt tools like Fed rate hikes, sucking liquidity out of economy. The inflationists also want scaling down fiscal spending as they think that economy is overheating due to expansionary policies which they say spell a disaster down the road - wage price spiral and period of stagflation. The idea of inflationists is to bring down demand in economy (at cost of jobs, economic recovery & growth) to prevent bad future. The inflationists have been somewhat successful in stalling govt spending plans and conv

India's reservation system from perspective of Neoclassical thinking

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Two flowcharts on some concepts i haven't fully articulated yet.

Delhi Pandemic alert system (GRAP) and Positivity rate

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There needs to be a reconsideration of Delhi's GRAP system. Covid-19 GRAP was a system formulated in response to public health crisis (humanitarian carnage) unleashed by Delta wave last year. The GRAP system has formulated a mechanism for phase-wise economic shutdown and lockdown of Delhi in response to rising Covid-19 cases.   Photo - HT This system factors in positivity rate (percentage of detected infections to total number of daily tests) as a guidance to establish how serious pandemic emergency is at any point of time. However, situation with Omicron wave is different than Delta wave - considering mortality and severity of disease. This is due to various reasons - the nature of new virus variant itself, our present vaccination rates & immunity in population, natural immunity from past waves etc. On question of immunity, i am not implying that we have "so much or so high" immunity due to vaccinations and natural infections. That question is for the experts to de