South Asia’s Geography of Conflict by Robert D. Kaplan.

A big black eye for India’s attempt at being a democracy. Also see Devangshu Datta in the Business Standard on this.

Interesting survey evidence in the India Today about how voters are starting to see the UPA differently. Focus on the graph in there. . . . → Read More: Interesting Readings for September 17, 2010]]>

South Asia’s Geography of Conflict by Robert D. Kaplan.

A big black eye for India’s attempt at being a democracy. Also see Devangshu Datta in the Business Standard on this.

Interesting survey evidence in the India Today about how voters are starting to see the UPA differently. Focus on the graph in
there. And here is the main story by Ashok K. Damodaran.

Nitin P. Shrivasatava, writing in DNA, says that we may finally have cracked a working mechanism to borrow shares in
India. If this is the real thing, it’s a big step forward for the equity market: a good stock lending mechanism is the last
piece of a well functioning stock market which was absent in India. Also see Mehul Shah in the Business Standard on co-location at
NSE. Maybe we’re finally breaking through some of these limits of arbitrage.

The two decade gap, by Ila Patnaik in the Indian Express.

Did you know that Saudi Arabia matches India’s achievements on higher education.

Jayanth Varma says that a lot might be going on in terms of INR trading outside India.

I updated my India bookshelf page.

Eric Bellman in the Wall Street Journal about the growth of McDonald’s in India. Apparently a new outlet in Bhopal has been
getting 10,000 visitors a day.

T. N. Ninan, writing in the Business Standard says we should move to the metric system with million, billion and trillion. I agree! GDP is Rs.55 lakh crore or Rs.55 trillion.

The 9% question by Akash Prakash, and Somasekhar Sundaresan in the Business Standard, on India’s middle income trap.

Shaji Vikraman in the Economic Times on the outlook for SEBI.

Amit Tripathi in the DNA has a story about Bharti Airtel starting a price war in Kenya. Once a telecom firm has learned how
to sell at Indian-style prices, it is ready to compete with telecom firms anywhere. Also see.

William Neuman has an article in the New York Times, which made me think about the appropriate role of the State, and what are
actually public goods, in the field of health. Translating $0.14 into rupees yields Rs.6.5 per hen, which is feasible in India, and
I’m sure that Indian drug companies would be able to get to lower pricepoints.

Skin by Mark Jacobson in the New York Magazine.

Patrick Chovanec speaks with Christina Larson in Foreign Policy, giving a glimpse into one of the last three communist
countries in the world. He closes with: We look back now and it seems inevitable — the fall of the Berlin Wall, China opening
up — but it wasn’t inevitable. I’m grateful to be able to go home at the end of my trip, and I’m grateful for the people whose
convictions and sacrifices made it so this kind of place is an anomaly in today’s world, and not the rule.

The frontiers of computer warfare, by Fredric Paul in InformationWeek.

The great writers of the 21st century: Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace.

Tim Harford in the Financial Times on the attacks on economics.

A rumination on creativity by Jonathan Lethem, in Harper’s Magazine.

See this book review of Mao’s Great Famine (Frank Dikotter) by Jonathan Mirsky, in the Literary Review.

Read this great interview with Tom Sargent. In particular, the chunk about how high microeconomic turbulence interacts with the welfare state to generate high and persistent unemployment.

Holman W. Jenkins in the Wall Street Journal on Google.

Fred Brooks in the New York Times on how little we worry that we are wrong.

An interesting book: Better living through Economics, edited by John J. Siegfried.

Lawrence Lessig in the New Republic on the difficulties of using a government (through copyright law) to make information
excludable.

David Pogue in the New York Times on the brilliant work at OpenDNS.

Patricia Cohen in the New York Times about the world of academic publishing that lies beyond peer review.

By the time 3G telephony came about, India was well into the telecom revolution. By December 2007, there were 190 3G networks in 40 countries and 154 HSDPA networks in 71 countries, but none in India. We’re now . . . → Read More: The Gang That Can’t Shoot Straight]]> On the mistakes in the recent CSO data release, see P. Raghavan in the Indian Express.

By the time 3G telephony came about, India was well into the telecom revolution. By December 2007, there
were 190 3G networks in 40 countries and 154 HSDPA networks in 71 countries, but none in India. We’re
now finally getting on with it, and will probably be the last place in the world with 3G telephony.

And there are the failures in organising the Commonwealth Games.

It is enough to make a man worried.

In a research report released last week the firm estimates that telecom service providers will increase their spending by 1.5% to $57.7 billion.

Avian estimates that the largest spenders will be AT&T Inc. (NYSE: . . . → Read More: U.S. Telecom Providers to Purchase and Innovate More in 2010]]> U.S. telecom and cable operators are likely to increase their capital expenditures this year according to estimates from Avian Securities.

In a research report released last week the firm estimates that telecom service providers will increase their spending by 1.5% to $57.7 billion.

Avian estimates that the largest spenders will be AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) ($17.5 billion), Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ) ($16.6 billion), Comcast Corp. (Nasdaq: CMCSA, CMCSK) ($5 billion), and T-Mobile USA ($3.5 billion).

Avian’s estimates may be conservative. Several weeks ago Dick Lynch, chief technology officer for Verizon said, “It’s no accident that again [in 2009], Verizon’s consumer and business services won major industry awards.” Lynch asserted that those awards were the direct result of network spending in 2009. “The better the network, the better the performance of the applications that ride on them. It’s as simple as that,” he said.

Accordingly, it is likely that communications providers will spend much of their 2010 capital budgets on technologies that increase the efficiency of their high speed wireless networks. In 2010, CTO’s are focused on core fiber capacity and grooming technologies. AT&T’s CTO John Donovan said last week that his firm completed 7.2-Mbit/s wireless upgrades throughout its whole network including doubling the number of cell sites with fiber-optic capacities.

“We expect that the majority of our mobile data traffic will be carried on fiber-based backhaul by the end of 2010,” Donovan said. AT&T will continue to enhance the “world’s largest deployment of 40-Gig backbone technology,” boasted Donovan.

Last week T-mobile had good news boasts of it own. The firm announced the completion of a scheduled upgrade to its entire network — an upgrade which boosts wireless air speeds from 3.6 Mbps to 7.2 Mbps. Additionally the company promises that speeds in 2010 will peak at blazing wireless rates of 21 Mbps and that spending on a trial in Philadelphia is already underway.

The spending news came just prior to T-Mobile’s announcement introducing the “Nexus One”, a smartphone that will run on T-Mobile’s network. The Nexus One supports these high speed wireless technologies and analysts see its pairing with T-mobile’s high-speed network upgrades as a significant enabler for economic and technological innovation.