What I never understood about money ...

Today I read a totally silly article which suddenly made me realize what always puzzled me about money. The article was called "Anglers let big cash bonanza get away," published in Reuters on April 25, 2008. (I'm going to now sound like a complete simpleton.) The article is about three Hong Kong fishermen, one of whom is a housewife, who caught an 85 kg rare fish and sold it for HK $20,000. They thought they had really hit it big. Then the fish changed hands two more times, finally selling for HK $ 1 million to a businessman. The fishermen felt cheated.

Two things are weird about this to me. Firstly, the actual fish didn't change. It arguably lost value by the time of the third sale since it was probably rotting. But the price paid for it increased so much. No extra work had been put into the fish, but within three transactions and not more than 48 hours, the price of the fish rose by nearly a million dollars.

The second thing that's weird is that the people who initially sold it for $20,000 thought they had hit the jackpot, but when they later learned that the fish sold for HK$1 million, they realized they lost money. Yet, here again, nothing changed about their initial situation (their sale of the fish for $20,000). They still had the money. They had expended no more effort. So how were they the losers in this situation? But even my stomach churns for them! They were cheated!

Even though I know that this is a common and normal situation, I still find it difficult to understand how something is valued. How do we arrive at a consensus on what something is worth? And isn't it strange that people are able to profit off the process of reaching that consensus?

The roots of revolutions, a quote via Cheryl

"Whether conditions in China had deteriorated to the extent to which a revolution was inevitable is perhaps besides the point, although this issue animates an impressive body of Western as well as Chinese scholarship. It takes more than oppression and misery to make a revolution... There is no threshold of human endurance beyond which human beings automatically become revolutionary. A revolution is the product of the human ability to reflect on one's conditions of existence and to work those reflections through a system of ideas that provides a vision of a more hopeful future, a social vision that exists at the level of the imaginary in that it conceives of something that does not yet exist" (Ann Anagnost, 34)

From my notes, extreme frustration, March 16, 2006

It is typical of the development projects announced by the government in India that they are ambitious beyond belief -- as cartoonishly outsized as the 80 foot hoardings of political leaders erected before elections. Consider the plan to develop the Taj Mahal into a mall and tourist complex, complete with cineplex. Or the Marina Beach development project, where the Tamil Nadu government was going to built a state of the art administrative complex on the seashore. There are no 2-lane highway projects, only 6-lane superfast highways.

The Important Numbers to Know

From Ashutosh Varshney's "Is India Becoming More Democratic?," Journal of Asian Studies

"According to the 1991 census, the scheduled castes constituted about 16.5% of India's population, and the Scheduled Tribes 8.1%....The Mandal Commission, the only nationwide source available on the OBC's, suggests that Hindu OBC's constitute about 43.7% of the total population."

Something to remember: Madras schools

According to the Draft Project Completion Report of the first Madras Urban Development Project (1984), 50% of the primary schools and the majority of secondary schools in Madras were private. I wonder what kind of implications this has for education policy, considering that Tamil Nadu has done so well on increasing literacy. If I remember correctly, Madras district has some of the lowest literacy rates next to extremely poor and rural districts like Dharmapuri.

More on Obama

From "Obama is Moving to Down-to-Earth Oratory," The New York Times, April 1, 2008

“The problem with talking about hope all the time is that these are not hopeful lands; Obama is talking change to people who equate change with life getting worse,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic Party consultant who has studied the political culture of these working-class states with a Talmudic intensity.

...

“If you’re an unemployed steelworker, a former coal miner, you want to know about job training, who pays your health care,” Dr. Madonna said. “Obama’s speeches are uplifting but without much specificity, and that’s a tough sell for working people who don’t live in a world of ideas.”