I read in today's newspaper that Dr. Abhijit Banerjee, professor of Economics at MIT, ex-Presidency College, JNU and Harvard, has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics.
Those who are curious might want to look up my review of his seminal book on this blog, written two years ago.
I smiled quietly to myself, recalling that nearly a decade and a half before Professor Md. Yunus won the Nobel, I had told my pupils about his prospects too, when few people in India - leave alone this town I live in - had even heard about him.
P.S., October 20: I was intrigued to learn from Banerjee's interview to my newspaper today that during the Eisenhower era in the USA marginal income taxes were as high (on the super-rich, that is) as 95%, a time when America and indeed all western nations were nevertheless growing very fast, mind you, and even under Nixon's conservative administration, 70%. Dr. Banerjee was laughing cynically that somehow the populace at large, rich and poor alike, seems to have forgotten this historical fact, and convinced themselves that marginal tax rates above 40% are sure to spell disaster for any economy! Something I didn't know, and something which very strongly bolsters my arguments on behalf of socialism, though Abhijit underscores the fact that no communist made those laws in the US! At the same time, I strongly agree with Dr. Banerjee that a new-era socialism must focus strongly on pragmatic, efficiently-achievable goals rather than any kind of woolly idealism, which invariably breeds both incompetence and tyranny.
P.S., October 20: I was intrigued to learn from Banerjee's interview to my newspaper today that during the Eisenhower era in the USA marginal income taxes were as high (on the super-rich, that is) as 95%, a time when America and indeed all western nations were nevertheless growing very fast, mind you, and even under Nixon's conservative administration, 70%. Dr. Banerjee was laughing cynically that somehow the populace at large, rich and poor alike, seems to have forgotten this historical fact, and convinced themselves that marginal tax rates above 40% are sure to spell disaster for any economy! Something I didn't know, and something which very strongly bolsters my arguments on behalf of socialism, though Abhijit underscores the fact that no communist made those laws in the US! At the same time, I strongly agree with Dr. Banerjee that a new-era socialism must focus strongly on pragmatic, efficiently-achievable goals rather than any kind of woolly idealism, which invariably breeds both incompetence and tyranny.
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