If you thought that I was about to quote Alexis de Toqueville, you were wrong. I quote H. L. Mencken. “As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

I was on the phone with my friend JP, talking about how extraordinarily successful the United States has been. I believe that part of that success arises from extraordinary luck. Around the time when the US became an independent nation, it had a bunch of amazingly wise people guiding it. As in the case of individuals — what one inherits is a random draw from the lottery of creation — so also for nations: the endowments that a nation is born with is random and exogenous. Among the giants who …

“If you think that it would be impossible to improve upon the Ten Commandments as a statement of morality, you really owe it to yourself to read some other scriptures. Once again, we need look no further than the Jains: Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the Bible with a single sentence: “Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being.” Imagine how different our world might be if the Bible contained this as its central precept. Christians have abused, oppressed, …

A few quotes from Thomas Jefferson, for the record, as they appear to refer to India’s present predicament.

Thus spake Heinlein. “The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories.”

A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read ‘The Lost Symbol’, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked …

That great Indian teacher, Gautama who became the Buddha, had once instructed his followers to stop dithering. He said, “Bhikshus, when you sit, you sit. When you stand, you stand. Don’t dither.”

Will Durant (1885 – 1981) was an American historian, writer and philosopher. His most famous work is the 11-volume “The Story of Civilization”, published between 1935 and 1975. In a 1931 work, “The Case for India“, he had this to say about India.

This morning I was reminded of the words of a song “Impossible Dream”. The song goes thus:

Thomas Jefferson (1743 – 1826), the third President of the United States (1801–1809), the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776) had this to say about Christianity –

Cities are the engines of growth. Therefore, a policy that promotes urbanization of the population is an indispensible instrument for economic growth and development. In the following TED Talk, Paul Romer, a world-class growth economist at Stanford, makes the case.

“If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” ask Clay Shirkey in a blog post “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable.” (March 2009). The full implications of technological change is impossible to foresee even by those who are responsible for the change.

From Carl Sagan to you know who via me.

Garrett Hardin (April 21, 1915 – September 14, 2003) proposed what he called the First Law of Ecology, which states “You cannot do only one thing”. He is also the author of the 1968 paper, The Tragedy of the Commons. I admire Hardin for his deep ecological thinking. Here’s a quote from his book ‘Living Within Limits:Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos‘ (1993, OUP).

Marvin Minsky of MIT is a cognitive scientist and an artificial intelligence pioneer. I recently came acros his 1981 paper on “Music, Mind, and Meaning” which I found informative and profoundly thought provoking. Here’s an extended quote from it, for the record.

We all want to make a difference. That comes effortlessly when one is dissatisfied with the current order of things. As the wise old dipsomaniac Omar Khayyam put it,
“Ah love, could thou and I with fate conspire,
To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire;
Would we not shatter it to bits,
And remold it nearer to our hearts’ desire!”

The web is a wonderful place where if you have the required smarts, you can get yourself a pretty decent education. Just having a lot of information at the click of a mouse would not do. You have to know what to take and in which sequence. What you get out of a book — or the web — obviously depends on you. But we can safely assume that one is reasonably well educated and can reason effectively at some level. If that is so, then the task becomes one …

An excerpt from today’s mail from Keith Hudson, a respected friend who lives in Bath, England. “Ideas in one’s head are slippery, slidery things and it’s not until one acts on them — in the form of changed behaviours or the production of tangible items — that their validity can be fully tested in the real world. Writing about them is only a halfway stage. However, the words one uses (and perhaps the new terms one invents) are rather like seeds that plants produce. They can float away in the …

Good work is not done by ‘humble’ men. It is one of the first duties of a professor, for example, in any subject, to exaggerate a little both the importance of his subject and his own importance in it. A man who is always asking ‘Is what I do worthwhile?’ and ‘Am I the right person to do it?’ will always be ineffective himself and a discouragement to others. — G H Hardy.