03 August 2010
It is impossible to buy a good or a service except with currency or a check (which is merely a representation of a demand deposit). Yet M1, which is the sum of currency and demand deposits, does not correlate well with real economic activity. The following paper resolves this apparent contradiction. By using Murray Rothbard's arguments but along different lines it shows that not all demand deposits bear the same character, and that the definition of money supply is therefore erroneous. When the error is removed the resulting monetary aggregate (which is different from the Austrian "true money supply") is seen to closely correlate to changes in the economy and that too without a significant time lag.
Read the whole paper below:
What really is money supply?
Category: Economics
02 October 2009
On the exaggerated death of directories
I believe that, if a triangle could speak, it would say, in like manner, that God is eminently triangular, while a circle would say that the divine nature is eminently circular. Thus each would ascribe to God its own attributes, would assume itself to be like God, and look on everything else as ill-shaped. -- Spinoza
Submitting sites to directories is mostly a waste of time and money, both of which could be more profitably employed elsewhere. How often have you heard this statement bandied about as if it were so obvious it would not need possible refutation or contradiction!
So let's test it out. Do a search on Google for "restaurants san francisco" (without the quotes). These are the first 10 results:
www.sanfrancisco.com/dining/
www.sanfrancisco.com/restaurants/downtown-union.html
www.onlyinsanfrancisco.com/where_to_eat/
www.yelp.com/search?find_loc=san+francisco%2C+CA&cflt=restaurants
sanfrancisco.menupages.com
www.bestofsanfrancisco.net/restaurants.htm
www.opentable.com/start.aspx?m=4
www.farallonrestaurant.com
www.foodyoyo.com
www.millenniumrestaurant.com
Two of these are web sites of restaurants. Most of the rest look like directories to me. If they look like directories to you they must be directories, no matter what anyone else may say.
The page ranks of these ten pages are 5, 4, 6, 4, 5, 4, 6, 5, 3 and 5. Nothing to be sniffed at, but no great shakes either in most cases. From the point of view of getting links, nearly all of them are pretty useless because they don't give a link which qualifies for PageRank, or if they do, it is on pages further down the category tree.
So as the owner of a restaurant, do you accept the opinion of the SEOs and conclude that it is pointless to submit your site to these directories? Would you prefer PageRank or would you prefer the fact that these directories, many of whom don't link to your site at all, send you customers who eat at your restaurants and pay good money to do it?
If, like any sensible business owner, you take the latter point of view you must ask yourself: Why then do the SEO gurus constantly downgrade the directories which, as any search on any search engine show, dominate the SERPs? For an answer you would do worse than look to the Spinoza quote that started this piece. A search engine optimiser looks at everything from an SEO point of view. He or she earns his living by getting clients' sites listed on other sites. A restaurant owner does not need an SEO's help to get listed on sites like the above. Ergo, since the SEO gets nothing out of such listings, he puts around the view that such listings are useless.
If you doubt this, then you must also give a thought to the severe criticism directed against DMOZ. Think of the last 10 times you heard an SEO ranting against DMOZ and ask yourself: What did he/she complain of? Almost certainly it was the fact that getting listed on DMOZ these days is well nigh impossible.
When, if ever, did you hear any SEO complaining that DMOZ pages rarely figure in the SERPs or that, from the viewpoint of someone looking for information, it is very nearly useless. It may have been useful ten or even five years ago, but the world has moved on since. DMOZ contains the sparsest of descriptions, no contact information, no phone numbers, and it cannot be accessed on the mobile. One would imagine any sensible directory to have all these features.
That should be the real complaint against DMOZ. That it has rendered itself irrelevant. Even the software has not changed much since it was first launched. To take one example, you cannot get a listing of restaurants in the US. The listing straightaway begins with listings of individual states. Hardly surprising then that Yelp.com's Alexa traffic ranking is higher than DMOZ's or that citysearch.com is close behind. At some point DMOZ forgot that its customers are not the web sites looking to be listed but the users who come hunting for information. The hordes of site owners begging for a listing made it arrogant. It forgot who its real customers were and it is paying the price for that.
Category: Internet
17 May 2009
A lot has been written about Wolfram Alpha, most of it lavish praise. Today it seems to have gone live and I thought of testing a few queries which I also tested on Google.
I saw a reference to Nova Scotia and had some doubt whether it was in Canada or the USA. Google returned a few sites dealing with travel to Nova Scotia (Canada), a link to the Wikipedia entry on Nova Scotia etc.
Wolfram Alpha returned a detailed reference to Nova 1 (spacecraft) with its location at Scotia, New York, United States. It went on to give me detailed information about its altitude, instantaneous velocity, average velocity, average latitude, orbital period, inclination, orbit type etc which is of course not what I wanted.
It reminds me of the girl in the nursery rhyme. "When she was good she was very, very good. And when she was bad she was horrid."
That made me try out Mother Goose on Wolfram Alpha. Disappointingly it said: "Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input." It offered suggestions but again they were all far off the mark. Google got it right with the first entry. You don't even need to go to it. The excerpt says: "Mother Goose is a well-known figure in the literature of fairy tales and nursery rhymes."
Wolfram seems to be a bit like the I'm Feeling Lucky button on Google. If you know that what Google will return as the first entry is what you want you can click the I'm Feeling Lucky button but otherwise it's best to go the conventional way.
Category: Search-Engines
06 June 2008
Global capitalists in Kerala paying abnormally high wages
You've heard of capitalists exploiting workers by paying sub-subsistence wages. Now they've gotten more devious. They're exploiting workers by paying abnormally high wages. I kid you not. Here's an excerpt from The Hindu of 4 June 2008 published from Thiruvananthapuram.
"The high wages offered by contractors at the Smart City construction site in Kochi have begun to affect the coir industry in adjoining Alappuzha district," according to Minister for Coir G. Sudhakaran.
"If things are going to be like this, we may have to take up the issue with the Chief Minister," Mr Sudhakaran said at a workshop on the use of coir as a geo-textile here on Tuesday.
He said it was improper for the Smart City contractors to offer "abnormally high wages" at their work site. Many coir workers from Alappuzha were boarding the morning trains to Kochi, lured by the offer of up to Rs 400-a-day for manual labour.
He said there was a limit to what a traditional industry such as coir could offer as wages.
Workers, especially the youth, were leaving the coir industry.
He described the high wages offered in Kochi as "the trickery of international capital". For a period of time the international capital would buy labour at high rates, only to get rid of it later.
On returning home, the workers would find their traditional means of livelihood gone, he said.
The Minister said this was not the kind of development Kerala needed. New-age industries should come to the State providing jobs to the educated youth.
At the same time, growth in that sector should not destroy traditional sectors such as the coir indutry which sustained several lakhs of poor families in the State, he said.
Very interestingly, the paper's archives column "This Day That Age" carried this item, dated 4 June 1958:
Mr Mao Tse Tung, Chinese Communist head of state, in his first published pronouncement for a year, on June 1 praised the poverty of the Chinese people as an incentive to revolution. Mr Mao was writing in the first issue of Red Flag, the new fortnightly theoretical review of the Chinese Communist Party. He wrote: "This seems a bad thing but it is in fact a good thing. The poor people want a change, want to do things, want revolution." Mr Mao said that "the political consciousness of the masses is rising rapidly" and "never before have the masses been so spirited, with such high morale and so strongly determined." He added: "The decisive factor besides the leadership of the party is the 600 million people. The more people, the more views and suggestions, the more intense the fervour and greater the energy." The article, which bears the stamp of Mr Mao's classical literary style, is rich in metaphor.
Category: Communism
22 March 2008
Baba Amte: The youngest of the young
An article I wrote on Baba Amte has appeared in a recent issue of Tehelka.
Category: Miscellaneous