Mostly Economics

When one reads such news, you till think there is some humanity, some empathy left somewhere.

Swiss investigators are racing to identify the victims of a fire that tore through a crowded bar, killing about 40 people and injuring 115 who were celebrating at a New Year’s Eve party in the Alpine ski resort of Crans-Montana.

President Guy Parmelin has said the country will hold five days of mourning, describing the blaze as one of the most traumatic events in Switzerland’s history. “It was a drama of an unknown scale,” he said, paying tribute to the many “young lives that were lost and interrupted”.

When similar events happened in Rajkot or Goa (and many more places) in India, the point was to just shift blame. The leaders of ruling political party will point how worse events happened in the past under some other political party. The opposition  would retaliate.

At the end cricodile tears are shed, money given to kin and we move on before the next fire breaks out….

I just stumbled onto the website of White House. The website welcomes you with the following words: WELCOME TO THE GOLDEN AGE! (yes in capitals letters).

As you scan thw website, you get this sense of dejavu all over again. The website is full of pictures of the “Greatest Leader/President” US has ever had and will have in future. It says things like “America is Back”,

Where did America go?

Then “The Work Never Stops”:

Noah Smith on his blog says: Our ancestors bought us eighty years of peace, institutional effectiveness, and moral clarity. But nothing lasts forever.

Further:

(more…)

92 year old Paul Biya has been Cameroon President since 1982. He won again for a record eighth successive term.

Madras Courier on the electoral farce in Cameroon:

For over four decades, Paul Biya has clung to power in Cameroon, a symbol of Africa’s enduring autocratic tendencies. At 92, his grip on the nation remains firm, built on a system of electoral fraud, state violence, and patronage.

While many parts of the world see political renewal through younger leaders, Biya’s rule is marked by stagnation, where opposition voices are silenced and reforms are a mere illusion. His regime’s manipulation of the electoral process has transformed democracy into a formality, with every election a farce.

Meanwhile, the country’s youth, increasingly disillusioned, face a future defined by repression and economic stagnation. Even as the international community grows more critical, Biya’s longstanding ties to powers like France and the US have allowed him to remain largely unchallenged. As Cameroon teeters on the edge of change, one question looms: how much longer can this aging autocrat hold on before the country demands its overdue transformation?

Autocrats can hold onto power longer than we can imagine and their decline is also quicker than we can imagine.

This elctoral autocracy is a farce in so many countries. You hold elections for namesake to show that you are a leader of masses but manipulate the system in such a way that no one else has a chance to get reelected.

Benedict Springbett in this substack post:

We could therefore say that the product of the railways (and roads, and airports) is travel. But we can be more specific than that. A railway is not like a road. A road is built, and then it is open for anybody to use it at any time. There is no need to plan out precisely when cars move along the road. The movements of trains, by contrast, have to be planned out months in advance. It would neither be possible nor sensible to run trains ad hoc. They are not taxis, free to roam the roads whenever they like. Railway tracks are a network; everything depends on everything else. The service from Cambridge to Norwich affects the service from Norwich to London Liverpool Street, which in turn affects the service from Liverpool Street to Southend. To optimise the use of the tracks, train movements have to be planned out well in advance with precision.

This planning is what we call the timetable, the mapping between space and time that determines which train occupies which track at which time. The railways offer travel to the public via the timetable: a traveller buys the (supposed) fact that the 12.32 from Reigate gets into London Victoria at 13.19. The product of the railways is the timetable.

Naseeruddin Shah turned 75 two days ago. It also marked 50 years of his work in theatre and cinema.

Sohini Chattopadhyay on the 50 years of Naseer:

It is half a century since Shyam Benegal’s Nishant in 1975 where Shah made his debut proper. (He had a walk-on part in the 1967 film Aman, that featured philosopher Bertrand Russell in a cameo.) In the years since, Shah has acted in an astounding 274 films listed on IMDb, with at least one film releasing every calendar year across this half century. In celebration, a fan lists her favourite Naseer films, with the aid of Bharata’s rasa theory

India’s political class has a new fascination: Hosting Olympics. Some of them are telling us how some of the cities where there jurisdiction lies are fit to host olympics! Really?

I mean when none of the cities are fit to keep its people, they are fit to host olymipcs? Where do these leaders get this arrogance and hubris from?

Cdr KP Sanjeev Kumar, a former Navy test pilot digs deep into tender documents issued by Uttarakhand Civil Aviation Development Authority (UCADA) to show how tourist lives ar cheap in India:

In the post, Cdr Kumar compares how heli services in Mumbai High with Uttarakhand which is worth reading. One is professional and another anything but professional.

It has been a month since I suffered a personal tragedy in the helicopter crash during the chardham strategy at Uttarakhand.   Since then, there have been four more crashes. The recent one led to the death of all the seven passengers.

I mean tell me one country where there have been so many helicopter crashes and yet things go on as if nothing happened. The government set up an inquiry commission after the first crash in May but nothing has come of it. How much time will it take? In the meanwhile, the helicopter operators continue functioning and crashing. It is just simply crazy.

The government has suspended the helicopter operations now but then what is the point? Families and friends have again been destroyed.   The flights should have been stopped a month ago which would have mean the later crashes would not have happened and lives would not have been lost.

In this regard, I don’t see the super tragic aircraft crash in Ahmedabad as a one-off event. Same with the recent stampedes at Kumbh and Bangalore. As I was writing this post, a bridge collapsed in Pune.  We blame it on crowd. But there was no crowd in the case of helicopter crash.

The key reason is lives are super cheap in India and the authorities just don’t care.  There is no democratic pressure from citizens holding authorities accountable. All the authorities do is to first deny the tragedy and then hide the actual number of those who suffered. The families and friends are too grieved to ask government take any action. Overtime, we forget and move on. It is back to normal in no time before a new tragedy strikes. It is a vicious cycle.

Whatever, 5 crashes in a matter of 40 days should be a record when it comes to negligience, misgovernance and shamelessness.

Peter Ainsworth writes in IEA blog:

Trump’s executive action-fuelled battles with woke universities fill the headlines. Columbia has capitulated; “heroic” Harvard holds its £53bn-endowment-funded ground. But these are skirmishes – tactical spats in a broader culture war. The real strategic shift is unfolding quietly in Congress, where profound legislative proposals to restructure university finance are advancing. If enacted, they won’t just reshape American higher education – they could undermine the UK’s global standing as the world’s No. 2 provider.

Enter the College Cost Reduction Act (CCRA), introduced by Representative Virginia Foxx, Chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. A key component is institutional risk-sharing – where universities accept some liability for student loan defaults. This idea had been circulating in Republican policy circles for some time, and the bill was formally introduced in January 2024. At the time, it went nowhere—just one of several structural reform ideas parked under a Democratic president and a divided Congress.

But Trump’s return to the White House, coupled with Republican control of both Houses, has propelled the idea back onto the legislative agenda. What’s new is that key provisions have now been introduced to the House as the ‘Student Success and Taxpayer Savings Plan’. A revolutionary structural reform that once looked purely theoretical is now a live prospect. Amid headlines fixated on campus protests and DEI rollbacks, the CCRA carries a deeper ambition: a legislative mechanism for holding universities financially accountable when their graduates fail to repay their loans.

There is an opportunity to fix long term issues in UK univs:

Under the current model, where universities are paid on recruitment, the graduate earnings premium has been in long-term decline. The only way to reverse it is to link institutional remuneration to graduate success, as the Americans are proposing to do. Done well, that would motivate universities to reduce costs and/or reorient courses toward real labour market value, reestablishing the economic relevance of higher education.

What’s needed now is political courage. Risk-sharing isn’t just a technical reform—it’s a reset of the relationship between students, universities, and the state. The U.S. is moving first. If the UK hesitates, America – and any country that follows its lead – will improve the economic returns of their degrees, while the UK becomes less appealing to the international students who pay most of the bills.

The UK still has the infrastructure, the reputation, and the global footprint to lead. But unless universities are rewarded for delivering real value – measured in outcomes, not enrolments – it risks slipping into the second tier: still talking about the problem, while others get on with solving it.