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Showing posts from August, 2017

Is Privacy a Human Right?

Yesterday a 9 judge bench of the Supreme Court of India gave a so-called historic decision of declaring privacy a fundamental human right now enshrined in the article 21 of the Indian constitution. Many are saying that this for the first time that some verdict is given unanimously by the bench 9 judges. This verdict now includes privacy also as a part of fundamental rights in article 21 of the Indian constitution, which wasn’t the case previously. Most people of the country and intellectuals have cheerfully welcomed this verdict hoping that this will stop the ruling BJP government from becoming totalitarian. The legal experts have hailed this verdict as historic, a watershed moment and a victory for common citizens by saying that it has far reaching implications for the matters like the beef ban, forceful use of Aadhaar card, government telling people what to wear and eat, abortion, LGBT rights, government surveillance in the form of reading peoples’ emails, text messag

Is Artificial Intelligence Threatening India Inc. Jobs?

A recent news report said that in India The IT services industry alone is set to lose 6.4 lakh low-skilled positions to automation by 2021 . Is this true? Let us scrutinize. What is Artificial Intelligence? As Jerry Kaplan, the author of Artificial Intelligence: What Everyone Needs to Know , has said, there is no one all agreeable definition of Artificial Intelligence in the computer community today. Roughly speaking, Artificial Intelligence means, as its founding father John McCarthy said, a process “that of a making a machine behave in ways that would be called intelligent if a human were so behaving.” Artificial Intelligence is an all encompassing name given to different automation technologies that is coming in the market since last couple of decades. From the economic perspective AI is nothing but just another type of capital good (machine) that is going to make the life of humans more comfortable because it increases human labor productivity. It is a form

Can Monetary Easing Increase India’s Economic Growth?

The second volume of government’s Economic Survey recently flagged a great risk of faltering economic growth in India, and demanded a loose monetary policy stance from the RBI in the form of further easing of the interest rate to combat this downside risk. The report said , Forecasting “greater downside risks” to economic growth, the Survey, tabled in Parliament Friday, argues that the “scope for monetary policy easing is considerable” and could go up to 75 basis points. The underlying theoretical basis of this recommendation of monetary policy easing is that a loose monetary policy in the form of lowering of interest rate will revive the economic growth. This means, this policy of loose money will only work if that underlying economic theory is correct. In this article we will analyze this theory and its implications. Is it true that a loose monetary policy can revive economic growth? To understand the answer of this question we need a quick short lesson of sound e

The Myth of Political Opposition

We are witnessing an age old fact about the State playing out in front of our eyes in India today. This fact is that of, as Murray Rothbard said, the state as an apparatus of parasitism which uses, as Franz Oppenheimer said, political means for its survival. The state is an institute which represent political power which its officials like politicians and bureaucrats use to parasitically live-off productive people on whom they forcefully and clandestinely rule by use of propaganda. One of such propaganda is that there are opposition parties in politics. Of late opposition party politicians are joining the ruling BJP party en-masse in India e.g., many Congress politicians switched over to BJP in the state of Gujarat , The Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar broke-off his alliance with Congress and other so-called anti-BJP parties like Lalu Yadav’s RJD to form a new government with its enemy BJP party, quite a few MLAs from the SP and BSP parites also joined BJP etc. Th