Uncategorized
The Popolo Project: A collaborative project for building international open government data specifications relating to the legislative branch of government, so that civil society can spend less time transforming data and more time applying it to the problems they face. A related goal is to make it easier for civic developers to create government transparency, monitoring and engagement websites, by developing reusable open source components that implement the specifications. Although the data specification is designed primarily for open government use cases, many other use cases are supported.
Open Data Policy Comparison: Best Practices: Spreadsheet on various aspects of open data policies that are coming up in federal, state, county and city levels in the US. Each policy is evaluated based on a number of parametres that helps assess how far the law will go in making government data truely open.
White House Circular No. A-130 Revised: This Circular establishes policy for the management of Federal information resources. It includes a detailed set of procedural and analytic guidelines for implementing open data policies. It provides a useful background reading for those interested in practical aspects of open data policy.
A small, but growing collection of my bookmarks on the Unique Identity Project of India Academic publications
Unique ID Project (Aadhar): Academic publications
If you are unable to reach Stanford.edu or a subdomain while others can, here is a possible fix. It's quick and simple.
Unable to reach Stanford.edu subdomains: Fix
I cannot forget the parting advice of a professor who just departed. It was a ritual that he followed batch after batch, and as far as I remember it was the only time in the class that he ever strayed out of the course topics; he was a kind of a serious man. As you go out of the school and start your lives, typically you will have two major options. You could choose a career and accept a lifestyle that comes with it, or choose a lifestyle and accept the careers that come with it. Very rarely is one fortunate […]
Remembering Suresh Tendulkar
How far can we understand a society on the basis of ancient texts One often hears Western commentators on China asserting that China is organised on Confucian principles. I do not know much about China and so cannot comment on how fitting this description is. But I have questions on making inferences about a society using a text written in 500 BC. To take an Indian analogy Manu Sashtra or the Laws of Manu were used by many authors (mainly till mid-1900s) to understand the caste system in India. In a paper written in the 1960s Andre Betèille criticised Louis […]
Confucius & Manu: Understanding institutions from texts
Basic components of an institutional understanding (Evolving note) Someone who has an interest in understanding the role of institutions in development, or institutional change will find it difficult to go about the task by ‘decoding’ the rules of the game and analysing them. The sheer mass of rules in any society will be overwhelming and will not be amenable to such analysis. Even that would be of limited help in understanding on how they operate. A more profitable approach would be to look at formative influences of institutions that are likely to have widespread influence. In this post, I look […]
Basics to understand institutions & institutional change
Economists have done numerous studies trying to relate the institutions of a country to economic growth there. This has been used to argue that institutional quality of a country matters for its growth. Is a country the relevant unit of analysis? Sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein argues that the world should be taken as one system. Interestingly a spate of recent works by mainstream economists begs us to take this approach seriously. Colonial impact on institutional set up A series of recent works in institutional economics have looked at the colonial impact on institutional formation. Based on a dataset of mortality of […]
World systems theory and institutional economics
Many sociologists have argued that caste system in India underwent a fundamental change with the advent of British rule. I did not understand what it meant till I saw colonisation at work in Iraq Concepts like social cohesion and trust have been central to the study of institutions in politics and in economics. It has been argued widely that a society that is more cohesive (or where people tend to trust each other) tends to perform better. This argument has been used in explaining economic growth, political stability, industrial productivity, functioning of markets, among other things. I subscribe to the […]
Colonisation & Social cohesion
Is social cohesion an absence of differences, or acceptance of differences Economists have argued that social cohesion & trust are important for economies to grow. But they have often mistaken cohesion to mean the lack of differences. If capitalism in Holland is anything to go by, it’s not the lack of differences, but an acceptance of it that leads to a cohesive society. Measuring social cohesion Having argued that social cohesion matters for economic performance economists set out to establish it. This was “achieved” by measuring social cohesion and relating it to growth (of course, teasing out other factors). Unfortunately, […]
Social cohesion & the Dutch revolution
Institutional economics has been mainly concerned with institutions for economic growth. Will the same insights apply for economic development? Suppose an island is discovered amidst the pacific and a group of people decided to establish a country there. These people are from a variety of backgrounds, speak different languages and are of differing abilities. They decide that they want to achieve maximum possible development over the long run and consult an institutional economist for advice. They state clearly that growth is not the same as development and that they want to maximise development rather than economic growth. What advice will […]
What institutional economics has to say beyond growth
In order to theorise the roles of institutions in development, it is important to define development first. In this post, I argue that Amartya Sen’s “development as freedom” is the most suitable framework for theorising institutions & development. Amartya Sen has made a powerful argument for looking at development as a process of enhancing substantive freedoms (e.g. freedom from hunger, illiteracy, morbidity, etc.). This is best encapsulated in his book Development as freedom. Sen argues that freedoms have an intrinsic and instrumental importance and that human agency is the key to the pursuit of development. All three ideas have a […]
Suitability of Amartya’s framework for institutions & development
Institutional economists have held that we do not know how institutions change. I speculate why collective action as an agent of institutional change has been ignored I used to be surprised that institutional economists argue that they do not know how institutional change happens. Collective action is such a prominent driving force, how could the economists have missed this? I speculate that this must be due to the structure-agent dichotomy in social sciences. Social theorists across disciplines have struggled between choosing structures or agency as their basis of analysis. Those who choose structures (production relations, prices, etc.) effectively assume that […]
Institutional economics, collective action & change
Let me start with a clarification that between the candidates I prefer Obama, and I hope that Obama-Biden will win this election. I am not a fan of Sarah Palin either. With this clarification, let me explain my criticism of SP detractors. A lot has been made in the last few days about Sarah Palin’s poor knowledge of world affairs, of economics and it has even been floated that she does not read much, and so is unsuitable to be a candidate. I actually don’t think that being widely read or being an “expert” is necessary for a good politician. […]
A word against Palin detractors
Pertinent questions are being asked about the sustainability of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in the US…but the causes and options are not articulated fully Since there is a lot of hullaboo about the “crisis” in social security I tried to find what it’s all about. To my considerable surprise, I found that if the current trends continue, the system will go insolvent in early 2040’s. This kind of foresight in fiscal planning came as a surprise to me – but it is welcome. The crisis is attributed to a demographic shift towards the aged that is going to sharply […]
You must be logged in to post a comment.