Raghuram G. Rajan: Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy

Raghuram Rajan is the Eric J. Gleacher Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. Dr. Rajan is also currently an economic advisor to the Prime Minister of India. Prior to resuming teaching in 2007, Dr. Rajan was the Economic Counselor and Director of Research (in plain English, the Chief Economist) at the International Monetary Fund (from 2003). Since then, he has chaired the Indian government’s Committee on Financial Sector Reforms, which submitted its report in September 2008. Dr. Rajan’s research interests are in banking, corporate finance, and economic development, especially the role finance plays in it. His papers have been published in all the top economics and finance journals, and he has served on the editorial board of the American Economic Review and the Journal of Finance. He has recently written a book entitled Fault Lines: How Hidden Cracks Still Threaten the World Economy. He also has an earlier book co-authored with Luigi Zingales entitled Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists



Dr. Rajan is a senior advisor to BDT Capital, Booz and Co, and is on the international advisory board of Bank Itau-Unibanco. He is a director of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and on the Comptroller General of the United State’s Advisory Council. Dr. Rajan is President (elect) of the American Finance Association and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In January 2003, the American Finance Association awarded Dr. Rajan the inaugural Fischer Black Prize, given every two years to the financial economist under age 40 who has made the most significant contribution to the theory and practice of finance.

Nandan Nilekani: Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation

In India, a hot button issue is the UID debate. A universal sort of ID, a national number sort of akin to the social security personal identifier in the United States is in the works. The author recently opined on the issue, and was mentioned on an Economic Times webpage this way: With some activists opining that the unique identity number should not be linked to the government's rural employment scheme, MNREGA , UIDAI chairman Nandan Nilekani has said the 'Aadhar' number should not be the basis for any discrimination. Asked about activists like Jean Dreze, a member of the National Advisory Council (NAC), not favouring linking Aadhar to MNREGA, he said the number should not be used in such a manner that one gets discriminated against. "Aadhar should not be a basis of discrimination," he said at the annual Rajinder Mathur memorial lecture organised by The Editors Guild of India. [...] Nilekani said the Aadhaar number will be helpful in opening a bank account, getting a ration card and many other things especially for the poor and the migrant labourers. He said the number will enable inclusive growth and development for the deprived and will act as an instrument of social inclusion. In 2009, The Economist magazine covered the book and author this way:

NANDAN NILEKANI, the co-founder of Infosys, one of India’s biggest IT firms, is a corporate icon in his homeland. But to many readers outside the country he is best known for a stray comment he made to Thomas Friedman of the New York Times in February 2004. His remark (“Tom, the playing field is being levelled”) inspired the title and thesis of Mr Friedman’s “The World is Flat”, a big-think book about offshoring and globalisation that sold millions. The publishers of “Imagining India”, Mr Nilekani’s admirable first book, must hope that many of those readers will be eager to hear the Indian side of the story, straight from the source. Not to disappoint them, Mr Nilekani provides a chapter on globalisation and two on information technology. But “Imagining India” is a very different book from Mr Friedman’s bestseller. Mr Nilekani, an intellectual trapped in an entrepreneur’s body, seeks to understand India through the “ebb and flow of its ideas” and debates. Some of these arguments are now resolved, even forgotten. Others have yet to be joined. A third category of ideas commands assent, but no action. And some arguments still burn white-hot.

Read that Economist piece here. See also: The India Way: How India's Top Business Leaders Are Revolutionizing Management, Doing Business in 21st-Century India: How to Profit Today in Tomorrow's Most Exciting Market, Doing Business in India For Dummies, The Richest East India Merchant: The Life and Business of John Palmer of Calcutta, 1767-1836 (Worlds of the East India Company). The author was a guest on The Daily Show in 2009, as well as a speaker at TED. See those videos just below.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Nandan Nilekani
www.thedailyshow.com
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Symbolism and Pragmatism: "How We Got From Estate Tax To 'Death Tax'" from NPR's The Two-way

Don Gonyea speaks with Columbia Law School's Michael Graetz (update at 10 a.m. ET: he's also a professor emeritus and lecturer at Yale law School) about the history of the tax for Morning Edition. Graetz is co-author of the book Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight Over Taxing Inherited Wealth. [...] Graetz tells Don that the estate tax in its current form was passed by Congress in 1916, just three years after the start of the federal income tax. Roosevelt supported the tax as an instrument for enforcing the equality of opportunity in the U.S. by making it more difficult to pass great fortunes from one generation to another. Graetz says that the public accepted the tax as a another progressive-era reform. "It was the beginning of the progressive era," says Graetz. "The income tax had just come in, in 1913. So, the public was very interested in progressive taxation and the estate tax was a natural piece of that kind of system." Significant opposition first appeared in the 1920s when Andrew Mellon of Gulf Oil tried to repeal the estate tax during his stint as secretary of the Treasury during the Coolidge administration. Then, in the 1940s, Graetz says that opponents started labeling it the "death tax" in a bid to gain wider support for the repeal movement. The movement never succeeded. But the 1990s saw a resurgence in efforts to kill the tax, with an emphasis on how it affects family farms and small businesses. Graetz tells Gonyea, however, that the estate tax has rarely affected these types of small family operations and that opponents eventually fell back to the position of advocating a complete repeal. In the end, Graetz says the debate over the tax seems more symbolic than anything else in light of the fact that it has never produced more than 2 percent of federal revenues in any individual year since World War II.

Read the full Two-way post here. There was also this Morning Edition radio show on the topic. "Symbolic." Politics is all symbolism these days, and so much of the inflated U.S. economy is about political gestures, i.e. purely symbolic gestures, in an attempt to win a philosophical argument or debate: we buy organic to make a statement, more than anything else; we buy books; we use certain sorts of social media. This book cuts to this symbolism, and at that, there's a pairing here. There's a paring with the pragmatism of Obama, which is best understood through the book, Reading Obama.

Charlie Rose's Monday, May 17, 2010 with Bill McKibben - Books - Bill McKibben, environmentalist and author has a new book called "Eaarth"

CHARLIE ROSE: Bill McKibben is here. Twenty years ago he wrote "The End of Nature," one
of the first books on global warming for a general audience. Since that
time, he argues the issue of climate change has become even more urgent.
His new book is called "Eaarth -- Making a Life on a tough new Planet." I
am pleased to have him back at this table. Welcome.

BILL MCKIBBEN: It’s very good to be here.

CHARLIE ROSE: So tell me where we are in terms of climate change at
this moment.

BILL MCKIBBEN: We learned today from NASA and others that January,
February, March, were the warmest January, February, March on record. NASA
said it’s now virtually certain this will be the hottest year we know
about.

What’s going on, the point of this strange title --

CHARLIE ROSE: Yes, look at this strange title.

BILL MCKIBBEN: "E" with two "a’s," you have to channel your inner
Schwarzenegger to pronounce it -- "Eaarth." The point is we’re already
living on a different planet. We’re all used to world we live in and
anything that’s going to change it in any significant way is hard.

B, because fossil fuel is the most profitable industry ever known to
man. And ExxonMobil made more money each of the last three years than any
company in the history of money. In our system that buys a lot of power to
delay, to deflect.

See: http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11016. See also: Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, The End of Nature, American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau (Library of America)