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My Friend Sancho
My first novel, My Friend Sancho, is now on the stands across India. It is a contemporary love story set in Mumbai, and was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize 2008. To learn more about the book, click here.
To buy it online from the US, click here.
I am currently on a book tour to promote the book. Please check out our schedule of city launches. India Uncut readers are invited to all of them, no pass required, so do drop in and say hello.
If you're interested, do join the Facebook group for My Friend Sancho
Click here for more about my publisher, Hachette India.
And ah, my posts on India Uncut about My Friend Sancho can be found here.
Recent entries
Daniel Pepper of CMS has a worrying story up on how RTI activists in India are increasingly facing a…
This sentence says so much about the level of parliamentary debate in India today: Finally, marshals were called in…
The quote of the day comes from a post by Roger Ebert: Resentment is allowing someone to live rent-free…
Alex Tabarrok writes: Suppose that you are a cow philosopher contemplating the welfare of cows. In the world today…
[EWWW POST ALERT] Reader Deepthi B sends me a link to a book named “Natural Harvest - A Collection…
23 January, 2008
Stimulus and Response
Many people find this video immensely cute—it’s been seen around 35 million times on YouTube. I can’t understand what the fuss is about, but here you go:
So there’s stimulus—pingggg—and a response from the baby. But getting a similar rise out of an economy is not so easy—especially with the kind of shortsighted stimulus packages going around. Russell Roberts explains why:
The standard stimulus package doesn’t change incentives. It’s a check from the government. The hope is that the receiver will spend it. But when you just send out checks from the government, whoever gets stimulated is likely to be offset by someone who gets unstimulated.
The money has to come from somewhere. If you raise taxes to fund the plan, the people who are taxed are poorer and they’ll spend less. If you borrow money to fund the plan, the people who buy the government bonds have less money to spend and that offsets the stimulus. It’s like taking a bucket of water from the deep end of a pool and dumping it into the shallow end. Funny thing—the water in the shallow end doesn’t get any deeper.
It’s that Bastiat thing again.
(YouTube link via email from The Not So Talkative Man.)
Posted by Amit Varma in
Economics
