On Justice Ginsburg's death and the ramifications thereof

Let me start off by saying that I am saddened by the passing away of Justice Ginsburg at the age of 87 on Friday, September 18th, 2020. To me I hold life as precious, as a gift from God, and therefore, I am always saddened at the loss of human life with condolences for the near and dear ones of the soul who just passed away. Additionally in the case of Justice Ginsburg, she served as a role model for many women and girls from around the country. I don't know who my daughter will look up to as role models but I believe if she learns about Justice Ginsburg, she would be impressed by the late justice's life and legacy. Finally - and this is where it gets complicated - I am also saddened by Justice Ginsburg's passing because the one thing that a country divided down the middle and living in two parallel universes as it were needed less of is an issue that will further polarize the electorate and drive many into their tribal camps even more intensely. I have lived in the U.S. since 2004 and nothing comes close to the rancor that I recall from 2018 during the nomination (and eventual confirmation) of Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh. I wasn't around during the recount in Florida in 2000 (and the subsequent vote by the S. Ct.) but I was around in 2005 through 2007 during the dark days of the Iraq War. I was also around in 2009 and 2010 during the passage of the Affordable Care Act under President Obama and I was around in 2017 during the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 and while the partisan environment during each of these instances was toxic, nothing comes remotely close to what I saw during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. I would pay a significant amount of money to have my country not be as pulled apart as it was during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings and therefore, now with Justice Ginsburg's passing, I am additionally concerned at what this vacancy on the Court will do to the country I love and care about. 

Now on to the legacy of Justice Ginsburg. I am not a lawyer although I certainly count myself as an avid follower of all things Supreme Court related and have been one for a number of years. And therefore when I look at Justice Ginsburg's jurisprudence and reflect on it, I have to be candid in admitting that her views were significantly to the left of mine and much more importantly, to the left of the Supreme Court itself, including two other justices appointed by Democratic Presidents, viz. Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer. Citing a few cases would make the point. Taking liberally from Oyez (https://www.oyez.org/cases/2018/17-1717) here is a brief summary of the Bladensburg Cross case. In Bladensburg, Maryland, as part of a memorial park honoring veterans stands a 40-foot tall cross, which is the subject of this litigation. The cross was built in the wake of the first world war and in 1961, the  Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission acquired the cross and the land, along with which came the responsibility to maintain and otherwise care for the cross. In more recent years, In 2012, a group known as the American Humanist Association, a nonprofit organization advocating for separation of church and state, filed the first known complaint against the Cross and argued that the Commission’s display and maintenance of the cross violates the First Amendment's Establishment Clause which prevents the government from establishing a religion. The case eventually wound its way to the S. Ct. which in a 7-2 decision decided in favor of the Capital Park and Planning Commission and holding that the Bladensburg Cross does not violate the establishment clause of the First Amendment. There are of course many nuances to that opinion, with several justices writing concurring opinions elaborating on their understanding of the case but suffice for us to note for these purposes that 7 justices of the Court (including Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer) agreed that the cross could stand as is. Justice Breyer's arguments are worth a read:

I have long maintained that there is no single formula for resolving Establishment Clause challenges. The Court must instead consider each case in light of the basic purposes that the Religion Clauses were meant to serve: assuring religious liberty and tolerance for all, avoiding religiously based social conflict, and maintaining that separation of church and state that allows each to flourish in its “separate spher[e].” I agree with the Court that allowing the State of Maryland to display and maintain the Peace Cross poses no threat to those ends. The Court’s opinion eloquently explains why that is so: The Latin cross is uniquely associated with the fallen soldiers of World War I; the organizers of the Peace Cross acted with the undeniably secular motive of commemorating local soldiers; no evidence suggests that they sought to disparage or exclude any religious group; the secular values inscribed on the Cross and its place among other memorials strengthen its message of patriotism and commemoration; and, finally, the Cross has stood on the same land for 94 years, generating no controversy in the community until this lawsuit was filed.....In light of all these circumstances, the Peace Cross cannot reasonably be understood as “a government effort to favor a particular religious sect” or to “promote religion over nonreligion.” And, as the Court explains, ordering its removal or alteration at this late date would signal “a hostility toward religion that has no place in our Establishment Clause traditions.” (Citations omitted) Who were the justices on the losing side of the case? Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor.

Thoughts on Dr. Abhijit Banerjee receiving this year's Nobel Prize in Economics

As a Bengali and someone who now teaches Economics, I did receive some questions about Dr. Abhijit Banerjee, one of the three recipients of this year’s Nobel Prize[1] and his contributions to the field. I had the chance to share my thoughts with my high-school friends and below is a lightly edited version of my reflections on Dr. Banerjee.

It's understandable that when somebody with the last name Banerjee gets a Nobel prize, many Indians, and Bengalis in particular, are proud of it. I for one, don't fall in that camp. To me, racial, ethnic, or gender identity matter little when it comes to my views on a person and the ideas that they espouse. What matters is the extent to which my ideological views line up with the person concerned and the extent to which I believe the other person is sincere in their views, even when those views differ from my own. To make this point concrete, on any given day I would rather vote for a white transgender individual who shares my views regarding the free market rather than an Indian male who advocates for more government intervention in the economy. And therefore, it is safe to say that my initial reaction to a Bengali winning the Nobel Prize is a yawn and a sigh; in other words, one of genuine indifference.

Because some of you may nevertheless be interested in knowing my views on Dr. Banerjee, let me proceed further and note that whether I am enthusiastic about his winning the prize depends very much on what I make of his contributions to the field of Economics and my assessment of whether he has moved the sub-field of Development Economics in a helpful direction or not. Before I begin let me state the obvious: I don’t operate anywhere in the league in which Dr. Banerjee does and neither am I an expert in his field of Development Economics; my areas of research are public finance and political economy. However, I have read a number of his papers and have some familiarity with his work and that of his co-author, spouse, and co-recipient of this year’s Prize, Dr. Esther Duflo. And based on that passing familiarity with their body of work, my view is that the influence of Drs. Banerjee and Duflo has been to push Development Economics in a direction that isn’t very helpful.

The reason I say that is because the duo have spearheaded the use of experiments in the field of Development Economics. A typical example might be one in which a bank randomizes loan offers to farmers. Say, the first group of farmers gets an offer of a 5% interest rate, a second group gets an offer of a 10% interest rate, and a third group gets an interest rate offer where the rate is not fixed, but conditional on how the weather turns out to be. If the weather in that area turns out to be good and farmers earn a healthy level of profits, they can naturally afford a larger payment and perhaps the interest rate is set at 16% in that case. However if the weather is bad, farmers are not required to pay any interest and are instead only required to repay the loan. In the context of such a research design, the questions might be:

1. Among the three groups of farmers, which group of farmers sign up for loans most often?

2. Is default lower for the third group of farmers who have the state-contingent loan, i.e. the loan where the interest rate depends on the weather?

My problem with that strand of work is that it doesn't help us answer the big questions in Economics that the average public (or policymakers) care about. It focuses by design on questions that are small because experiments can be designed only for questions with relatively low stakes. This approach of conducting experiments is completely unhelpful for helping us figure out answers to questions like:

1. Did demonetization help or hurt the Indian economy?

2. Did the several rounds of quantitative easing by the US Federal Reserve help or hurt the US economy? Did it lead, for example, to higher levels of inequality as some of my research on the effects of an easy monetary policy seems to suggest (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165176519301958)?

3. Many Democratic candidates running for president have proposed wealth taxes of various kinds. What would be the impact of such wealth taxes, if imposed, on investment and capital formation? Would it reduce wealth inequality as their proponents claim?

These are all kinds of questions that the average person would care about a lot and the fact of the matter is that the experimental approach pioneered by Banerjee and Duflo would have little to say on these kinds of questions. If that were the only drawback of the kind of scholarship advanced by Banerjee and Duflo, that would be bad, but that alone wouldn’t get me riled up to the point where I feel like writing this blog post. What does get me somewhat riled up though is that this group of scholars who have pioneered the use of experimental methods in Development Economics have also tried to get economists across the board to think that unless the evidence for a question of interest comes from an experiment, that evidence is less than credible. Now that IS unfortunate because ultimately for the big questions we care about as a society, we will never have the luxury of being able to conduct randomized control trials. And that is primarily why I am not a fan of Abhijit Banerjee or Esther Duflo and not too happy with this year’s selections by the Nobel Prize Committee.

Another side-note to why I haven’t been fans of Abhijit Banerjee or Esther Duflo and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) – the research lab set up to facilitate conducting their work, in particular, randomized control trials. In my view, the duo have contributed to making the field of Development Economics less democratic. It takes a lot of money (and I mean A LOT) to fly into a developing country and do experiments like the one I gave an example of. Few institutions outside of MIT and Harvard have the resources to run these kinds of experiments. But because the duo have held editorial responsibilities at some of the most influential journals in the field of Economics, for example with Esther Duflo having been the Editor at American Economic Journal: Applied Economics for 10 long years and now serving as an editor at the American Economic Review, in my view, they have downplayed work that  does not rely on randomized control trials. The net result has been that the field of Development Economics has been monopolized by them and affiliates of J-PAL and in the process, become much less democratic.

A final thought in response to the idea that governments could in principle rely on the kind of evidence generated by these randomized control trials in formulating policy. As it turns out, few developing countries have the skilled human capital or the political will to conduct experiments side-by-side researchers from MIT and then implement the findings that come out of these experiments. Much of the work conducted by J-PAL for example has been in Africa where a newly elected government often starts off anew and abandons all projects that were initiated by the outgoing government. The kind of continuity in policy that is necessary for these experiments to bear fruit is simply not there in many developing countries around the world, where political stability is far from given. But I think the biggest criticism I have of the strand of work pioneered by J-PAL is that it is simply quite unknown if their experiments would scale up well.

To use my previous example, perhaps the loans where farmers’ repayment is dependent on the weather is best for the farmers and leads to lowest default rates. And because the differences between the three groups are statistically significant, that study leads to a very nice publication for its authors – exactly the kind of scholarship which the Nobel Prize Committee would consider at as it makes its decisions of who to award the prize to. However, the fact that the study got published in a leading journal does not mean that we can scale up this experiment as-is or that the results from such a scaled up experiment would benefit society at large. For example, if in fact there is bad weather and all the banks who made these state-contingent loans get back less money than is necessary for them to operate profitably (remember that banks do not receive any interest in the case of bad weather), does that raise the likelihood that some of these banks (or financial institutions) will go belly up? If so, that would surely result in a myriad of problems for the local economy. If, on the other hand, the government steps in to offer subsidies to these banks (because they are now incurring losses), that “solution” comes with its own set of problems such as an increase in the government’s budget deficit. Regardless, my point simply is that the kinds of experiments pioneered by J-PAL are not only unhelpful for the big-picture kind of questions we as a society care about, they are harmful in that the evidence on the scalability of these experiments is pretty razor-thin. In the jargon of economics, through these studies, we only know the partial-equilibrium response to small questions; we don’t know the general-equilibrium response to those very questions, let alone the general-equilibrium response to questions that are grander in scale and scope that we as a profession have a fundamental responsibility to grapple with. So in the end, if you find me less than thrilled that a Bengali has been one of the three recipients of the Nobel Prize in Economics, hopefully I have carefully explained to you why that might be the case.

---

[1] The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for the finicky among you

Comments on the AEA code of conduct

I write to express my general support for the Draft AEA Code of Professional Conduct and to add to it. While the inclusion of age, gender, race, and ethnicity seem obvious and understandable, I find the omission of “political ideology” to the list of attributes troubling. While one’s sexual orientation or disability status or genetic information are unlikely to have a bearing on one’s views of say, the minimum wage on employment, one’s political views are likely to have a bearing on that question. One has to only take a casual look at the stream of research on minimum wages published by the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) and UMass Amherst to admit of the possibility that the ways those scholars view the world influence their findings or, at a very minimum, put them at odds with other scholars who also work in the area (Fn. 1).
This discussion by the AEA on a professional code of conduct for our profession also seems to be taking place simultaneously with discussions of how diversity is important for deciding on who we interview and who we bring in for campus visits. However, such discussions seem to be dominated with an emphasis on gender and ethnic diversity, which to me, seems awfully limited. After all, at a university, the kind of diversity we ought to care most about is the diversity of thought and as Nicholas Kristof put it in a recent piece in the NY Times, “Universities should be a hubbub of the full range of political perspectives from A to Z, not just from V to Z” (Fn. 2).
Along those lines, let me offer a personal anecdote. Before pursuing a PhD, I worked at a consulting firm for two years. At the very start of my job, we went through a training and had colleagues from all over the world in the same room and I was struck by how similar they sounded, regardless of where they were from and how they looked. That same experience was repeated over and over again including at a 2-week workshop where, as before, we had a diverse group from all over the world (including someone who identified as gay, an African-American, and a close-to-even split between males and females). Yet at the very end of the workshop someone remarked – “Now I know I have a group of 25 friends who think just like me.” I could offer other examples from my experience but I hope that they convey the point I am trying to make – diversity has got to be more than skin deep.
I finally want to touch on another issue that’s less directly tied to the code of conduct per se and more tied to the issue of integrity in research and how we as a profession go about practicing it.  Everyone reading this is likely to have come across the well-known study “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal?” While it is one of my favorite papers and I have nothing but the highest respect for both authors, it is an open question that I lay out there – would this study have received the attention it did if it had reported a null set of results as opposed to the results it did, holding constant everything else about the paper? While there is no magic bullet that I can think of which would address all my concerns related to how research is conducted, I think pre-registering studies would help. (Fn. 3) The requirement that all studies published in an AEA journal provide their data and code helps too (I have downloaded such data/ code more than once and used it for examining my own work) but the AEA could encourage all journals (including non-AEA ones) to adopt such a policy. Finally, encouraging studies that come up with null results to be also submitted is desirable. After all, if the requirement for every audit study examining discrimination to be published is that it find effects in the expected direction, then a true understanding of the extent and degree of discrimination will elude us.
Fn. 1: See Isaac Sorkin “Are there long-run effects of the minimum wage?,” (RED, 2015) or Ekaterina Jardim et al. “Minimum Wage Increases, Wages, and Low-Wage Employment: Evidence from Seattle” (NBER Working Paper No. 23532) for recent examples of research that run counter to the stream of research published by the IRLE.
Fn. 2: https://tinyurl.com/hae5bwu
Fn. 3: https://tinyurl.com/jdf3u94

My thoughts to students at the end of the semester

Every semester I seem to make some changes and tweaks to the course in the hopes of making it better. And this semester too, I have made some. For example, incorporating the occasional cartoon in my slides was one of the tweaks I made. I also worked hard to make sure that materials were uploaded on Blackboard on time so that you had a more seamless experience. And finally another tweak that I am making is this: I am choosing to end this class by sharing some reflections and advice with all of you.

I want to start off by talking about some of the larger lessons that I hope you can draw from this course. One of the first principles that I hope you take away is that incentives matter and that people act rationally. I am not suggesting that people act rationally always in every single context; other emotions like envy or a sense of fairness come in which cannot be easily explained using the framework of rationality. That said, people behave rationally often enough that if you are trying to understand someone’s actions, you could start off by assuming that he (or she) is acting rationally. Put yourself in the person’s shoes and think about the factors that a rational person is likely to consider as he makes his decisions.

The second general takeaway from this course is that it doesn’t matter whether you like it or not – the laws of demand and supply are real and they matter, especially in the long run. Many an authoritarian regime has tried to behave as if the laws of demand and supply do not exist, but that willful ignorance of these laws has only come back to bite them in the rear. Venezuela and Zimbabwe are two examples from our present times but there have been many others over the course of human history.

Third, how competitive markets are matters. Through my own research (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joie.12152/abstract) and the research of countless others, we know that competition is the consumer’s best friend when it comes to the quality of customer service, the diversity of product offerings, and the prices that consumers pay. To take a few examples, in two industries – cellphone service and brokerage services – the presence of at least four national players, along with several smaller players, has led to real benefits for customers.[1] Prices have been lower than they were ever before and there are more offerings to choose from.

Nevertheless in spite of all of these points, governments do have a role to play in the economy. The operation of the judicial system which helps resolve disputes that arise in the course of business transactions (especially, transactions among strangers) will always fall to the government. Governments also have a role to play in setting up the rules of the game which firms need to abide by. For example, the requirement that all publicly listed firms present audited financial statements on a quarterly basis, following what are known as Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, increases the confidence of the public in the financial markets and leads them to invest their hard-earned money in the first place. Financial markets would be far more chaotic, not to mention much smaller, if basic regulations around how companies can raise money from the public and how they must conduct themselves once they do so, did not exist. Thus, governments have a critical role to play in ensuring that markets work properly.

If I try to sum up what I have said thus far – it would be this: you could be the most bleeding heart liberal that there ever was but you would be better off (and your plans would be more likely to be successful) if you could leverage the natural strengths of markets and in providing incentives which induce people to act on them. The Soviet Union had a decent run by pretending that human beings do not need to be provided incentives to act on, but in the end that is what led to its collapse. By the same token, you could be the most diehard Tea Partier (if such a thing still exists) but you really can’t get to Nirvana by doing away with the government altogether. Building on an analogy that my advisor frequently made, if high taxes (and a large government) are the death knell that some make them out to be, then Nordic countries would be wallowing in poverty – but they aren’t. In fact, when you look at the data, it is quite hard to find a connection between the size of government and the level of prosperity people enjoy. Some of the places with the lowest taxes are failed states in Africa and the Middle East and some of the most prosperous societies are Nordic countries with some of the highest taxes in the world. Life is more complex than simply saying – smaller governments are always better governments.

Now pivoting away from what economics teaches us to what life has taught me, let me try to share two pieces of advice if I may. The first is very simple: you are likely to have heard it from your teachers in first or second grade and from your parents and now you get to hear it from me again – hard work matters. A few days back when I decided that I would talk to you for the last few minutes of this class I obviously had an idea of what I wanted to talk to you about in broad strokes. But that did not mean that I would come to class and talk about it extempore. If I added up the entire amount of time that it took me to work on this talk, it would amount to over three hours. I wanted to write things out so that I could choose my words carefully. And when I realized that trying to type a speech into a computer from scratch wasn’t a great idea and was preventing my creative juices from flowing, I put the computer aside and went the old-fashioned route of putting pen to paper.

But this hasn’t been the case just for today; my desire to come into class prepared has been my goal throughout the semester. On most days, I would take much of the time during office hours to look at the slides and go over what I wanted to say in class. On the few days when I did not get a chance to do that (or did not have the discipline to do it), it would take me longer to get everything right during class in the way that I would like things to be. It is a bit like what happens in a play – when an actor forgets his line and a fellow actor prompts him, the audience is unlikely to catch the slip right away but they may get the impression that something is off. And if it happens more often, then almost certainly they will figure it out. I believe that is true for you as well as students in my class and therefore if I had to avoid staring at the board for longer than is strictly necessary, I was required to have put in the work before coming to class – something I tried to do throughout the semester.

Let me offer another corroborating example because truth be told – I am a novice and should be reviewing my material before coming in. A few years back at a departmental reception, I was talking to one of the senior faculty members in my department. This is someone who is a little over 50 years old and had been teaching at the university for say, 25 years. Imagine my surprise back then when she told me that when she went into her classroom, she still spent a significant amount of time in reviewing her material. In other words, she wasn’t trying to wing it and neither should you. Hard work matters. In the future when you start working and you are being asked to attend a meeting, do your homework. Often material gets circulated ahead of meetings. Read it. The chances you will be able to make a favorable impression on your colleagues goes up if you spend effort into thinking and preparing for them.

If I can offer another piece of advice, it would be to eventually find a career path for yourself that you are passionate about. While we all work to pay our bills and our mortgages, that shouldn’t be the only reason we work, or maybe even the primary reason we work. I have held jobs in the past that came with significantly higher compensation than my current job and yet I have lasted a maximum of two years in these jobs. In contrast, I have now been a faculty member for 3 years and intend to be in this profession for a very long period of time – perhaps even at this university. The reason I say that is because I enjoy both facets of my job – the teaching and research. I hope you have felt that I have cared about my responsibilities as a teacher because it really makes a difference to me whether or not you understand the concepts of economics that I am trying to teach you. But I also greatly enjoy the other aspect of my job which involves research because I can pick questions or issues that I find most interesting and can pursue them to their logical conclusion – without worrying about whether my results line up with someone’s prior beliefs or not. That is a feature of my job which I enjoy greatly and I know that most of my colleagues (and your professors) do as well.

Now it is quite OK if you as a freshman don’t have a sense yet of what you are passionate about. I certainly did not embark on my current path of making a career in academia until the age of 28 when I started my PhD program. As I have mentioned, I was trained as a chemical engineer during my undergraduate studies; I went on to get an MBA but as it turns out the career paths that opened up for me after those endeavors were not good fits for me. It was however those less-than-perfect experiences which gave me a sense of what might work for me and I can certainly say that academia fits me to the T and I am significantly happier here than I was at my previous jobs. Likewise, if you try your hand at a few different things, you are much more likely to figure out what is it that you are really passionate about. If you marry my first advice – work hard – with this second piece of advice – work on something you are passionate about – then you are much more likely to be successful and happy regardless of what you end up doing.

With that, let me end and simply wish you the very best for your college careers and whatever lies ahead of you. May God bless you and may He guide you with wisdom and humility. Thank you.

---

[1] See, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-sticker-shock-plunging-cellphone-bills-1498232910 and https://www.investors.com/news/e-trade-slashes-trading-fees-to-6-95-as-online-broker-price-war-continues/ for examples.

Thoughts regarding India's demonetization

A friend asks me regarding my thoughts on India's experiment in demonetization:

My response: I am not going to comment extensively on demonetization. When I comment on economic issues, I hold myself to a higher standard and hope that I am summarizing the literature, rather than sharing my own viewpoints on the matter. As an example, within this last week when two journalists reached out to me requesting comments on things I have worked on in the past, it still took me longer than an hour to read articles and think through my response. And those were things that I have researched on. I haven’t researched on demonetization and am not a macro economist so therefore it would take me even longer – at least several hours – to read the evidence that has come out/ is coming out and share my thoughts on it. So I am going to pass on that.

I will however comment about what is perhaps the most important aspect of demonetization and one I think is critical to whether this program is a success or not. And this has to do with the theme of tax evasion and compliance, a topic that I do know something about (e.g. http://tinyurl.com/y8jpvl25). To my mind, unless the revenue agencies are able to develop processes and systems which let them compare the amounts being deposited by individuals relative to what they had declared on their tax returns and then investigate discrepancies, then demonetization would be a failure. I mean if the powers-that-be were hoping that the “black money” wouldn’t get deposited in banks and that would be a one-time negative shock to the stock of wealth held by corrupt individuals, then that was a pipe-dream. So we truly will have to wait and see what happens to the tax base over a span of 3-5 years, how many people are brought into the tax net, does compliance go up, and so on and so forth before we are able to comment on whether demonetization was a success or not. (Reading through this article on Rediff doesn’t indicate to me that the negative shock I talked about was the goal of Mr. Arun Jaitley. He may however now be speaking with the benefit of hindsight and one might have to discount his statements accordingly. But Mr. Jaitley does note – “With the return of the money, the owners have been identified, he said, adding that the tax department is scrutinizing 18 lakh bank accounts with unusual deposits post note ban that do not match with previous income profile.” Reference: http://www.rediff.com/business/report/have-all-rs-1000-notes-come-back-to-rbi-post-demo-well-no/20170830.htm)

Now in best-of-class execution, one would define those goals ahead of time in order to precisely quantify what success looks like (say, a 30% increase in real tax receipts within 5 years) but I doubt this scheme falls in that category of best-in-class execution so unfortunately we do not have those objective yardsticks defined ahead of time. And so in the end I think I will have to wait for an enterprising PhD student somewhere with interests in Monetary and Development Economics to write an evaluation of the demonetization program. The state of knowledge generation is such that it will likely require more than one thesis to flesh all of this out. And that will be in the end what I base my own assessment of the program on. It would be foolish for anyone to trust folks who have always been critical of the government (and Dr. Amartya Sen undoubtedly heads that list but Dr. Kaushik Basu isn’t far behind) but that's not all. One should also exclude people who are currently employed by the government or have hopes of being so in the near future. With the National Rural Employment Guarantee Program for example, a huge initiative by the Congress government under Manmohan Singh, it is the work of one of my friends at Michigan that I trust more than anything else on the matter. It was her thesis work (https://sites.google.com/site/lauravanessazimmermann/) and as someone who is not ethnically an Indian, also likely to have been objective in its assessment.

Follow-up: Here is a piece from the Wall Street Journal describing some of the issues with detecting and monitoring tax evasion following large deposits. I think it is fair and balanced (https://www.wsj.com/articles/flood-of-cash-swamps-indias-tax-hounds-1486463407) and while it emphasizes that demonetization works only if evasion is detected, it is not shy to point out the many issues with it.

The decision to filibsuter Judge Neil Gorsuch is the wrong one...for Democrats

I say this as a Republican but would have said the same if I were a Democrat: Democrats filibustering Gorsuch is the stupidest thing they can possibly do - even when viewed exclusively in light of their own self-interest. Neil Gorsuch was picked in the hope of getting 60+ votes in the Senate and by all accounts, he should have. For context, when he was nominated on the 10th Circuit court of appeals in 2006 where he now sits, his nomination was approved by a voice vote and only 1 person showed up at his hearing - Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. The issue is that notwithstanding the Democratic filibuster, Judge Gorsuch will be confirmed (perhaps as early as this week) and the Senate's rules/ norms will be changed. That now seems to be a done deal. The real issue is what comes next? 

No one knows when the next vacancy will come about on the Court but based on age, the ones likeliest to step down (either through death/ ill health) would be Justices Ginsburg (aged 84), Kennedy (80), or Breyer (78). Justice Ginsburg literally is at one end of the spectrum when it comes to being a liberal justice, Justice Breyer isn't significantly better, and Justice Kennedy - well he is the true swing judge on this present court. Now with the rules for confirming SC justices changed, the President will have no incentive to appoint a "mainstream" conservative like Judge Gorsuch. Instead he could appoint Judge Pryor who was reputed to be on the shortlist and is on record as having said that Roe v. Wade (1973) was the “worst abomination in the history of constitutional law”. (http://www.salon.com/2017/01/18/trump-meets-with-supreme-court-candidate/) In that case, even if an extreme nominee loses the support of a few Republicans (as happened with the Betsy DeVos nomination), DJT can get that nominee through. (Democrats, pls. check what the 2018 calendar for Senate races looks like before you comment). And therefore, while it is by no means certain that one of the justices will die/ retire in the next 3 years, it could happen. And while, a second term for DJT looks unlikely, stranger things have happened and esp. if DJT stays on until 2024, he will assuredly have 1 and perhaps even 2 or 3 vacancies to fill and the court will be packed with solid conservatives for a generation, maybe more. :)

Those are the key arguments. How about the other arguments such as - this will energize the Democratic base? Well - it doesn't look like the Democratic base is up in arms against Judge Gorsuch - e.g. there was not a single protester (Code Pink or otherwise) during three days of hearings and that needs to be compared with the protests against Sessions or DeVos during their hearings. 

What about the arguments that Democrats don't want to hand DJT an easy victory or this is retribution for Merrick Garland? Well - when in 3 or 5 years, the Court decides on another case as massive as Sebelius vs. NFIB (the original Obamacare case), and it goes down as a 5-4 because of conservative justices appointed under DJT, then the question of having handed DJT a victory in spring of 2017 will seem very quaint and would have faded from public memory. 

Finally, Merrick Garland - what about him? Yes - what happened to him wasn't good but we played politics.... and won. You cannot take politics out of politics, let's just say that. Frankly, President Obama could have appointed him for either of his first two vacancies but he chose not to - in order to pick a more ideological justice like SS and so Judge Garland was the sacrificial lamb in the end. The real question is not whether what happened to Merrick Garland was fair or not (it wasn't) but 1) whether Democrats would have behaved any differently if RBG had died in President Bush's last term in office and there was a Democratic-controlled Senate? 2) Also, would filibustering Judge Gorsuch achieve the Democratic party's goals of preventing him from being seated (no) and 3) whether it would give them sizable political benefits? (no, again). In contrast, Republicans were successfully able to prevent Merrick Garland from coming on the Court and the thought of picking the next SC justice let a lot of Republican voters to hold their nose and vote for DJT. Neither are true here.

Now how about Republicans - couldn't abolishing the filibuster come to bite them in the butt? Well, not really. If and when the stars align again to give the Democrats, the Presidency and the Senate, they will get to appoint someone of their choice. But that's OK - the justices appointed by Democratic Presidents have never been viewed as swing from what I can tell; no one waited in bated breath for how Justice Sotomayor was going to vote on Sebelius vs. NFIB - (repeal of Obamacare for others); in that very important case, the swing justices (based on oral arguments) were Justices Roberts and Kennedy and in the end, Chief Justice Roberts proved to be the swing vote. In fact, it says something about both the parties and the judges, that the only ones who have been viewed as swing justices on the court in its last 15-20 years have been Republican appointees - earlier, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, most recently, Justice Kennedy, and now, in a few rare instances, Chief Justice John Roberts. (I am not even including Justices David Souter and John Paul Stevens - both Republican appointees - who let's just say, surprised the Presidents who appointed them, and not necessarily in a very nice manner). So it is not as though, the views of any Democratic appointee on the Court will be a surprise; we know very well from history what we will be getting.

So all in all - as a Democrat, I would have been very concerned and disappointed that the filibuster to Supreme Court nominations would fall by the wayside, whereas as a Republican, I would be quite pleased and elated at future prospects, even if I were somewhat disappointed in the Senate becoming a body devoid of bipartisanship.

Should we do away with the Electoral College?

In recent weeks following the election of Mr. Donald Trump to the Presidency, accompanied by his loss in the popular vote, many commentators have called for the abolition of the Electoral College and moving to a national popular vote. Here is one column from E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post advocating just such a position. (http://tinyurl.com/hlwg9y7) I have often been tempted to write about this issue but there was something in the op-ed which irritated me enough that I decided to respond with a letter to Mr. Dionne. 

Before getting into the letter itself, let me finally note one other thing: we never talk of changing the rules of the game after the game has been played and a winner has been chosen. The participants in a game take the rules of the game as a given and then decide how to play the game. In the case of this 2016 presidential election cycle, if we had decided that the winner of the national vote would be elected President, it is clear that electoral strategies would have been different. Democratic volunteers from the state of Massachusetts would have less time on their hands to go campaign in neighboring battleground New Hampshire and parties and PACs would have run ads and focused their ground games very differently. One could also make the case that Mr. Trump's persona and strategy of addressing big crowds in large rallies would have been more useful rather than the nuts-and-bolts strategy of Mrs. Clinton's campaign which, in my view, rested on trying to reassemble the Obama coalition of 2012 block by block. The point is I don't know who would have won the popular vote if we had agreed that the winner of the popular vote would be elected President but what I do know is that the outcome may have been different than the current outcome. What I also know is that criticizing the outcome of a game when evaluated under a hypothetical set of rules different from the rules that the game was played under is hypocritical and shows the person holding such views in very poor light. With that being said, here is my letter to Mr. Dionne.

Hello Mr. Dionne,

I would like to share three of my observations re: your article in the Washington Post on the Electoral College:

1. Would you have written this op-ed if the winner of the Electoral College and the popular vote had been flipped? I can’t answer this question convincingly for you but as of now if you told me that you would have written that op-ed regardless, I am afraid I could only doubt your credibility and honesty. J

2.  If the Electoral College goes today, shouldn’t the Senate follow simply based on consistency of logic? After all, California with its 39 million+ people (http://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/06) still gets the same two Senate seats as Wyoming does with ~600,000 people (http://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/56)?  Either you believe in doing away with equal representation of the States in the Senate (which is consistent with your views on the Electoral College but inconsistent with the history of this country) or you believe in retaining the equal representation of States in the Senate (which is inconsistent with your views on the Electoral College); which one is it? If you advocate doing away with the equal representation of the States in the Senate, something that is plausible if after the 2018 cycle New York and California end up being represented by Democrats, who nevertheless find themselves in a hopeless minority, then you are asking us to violate the most basic tenet under which States agreed to become a part of this federation. Would you agree?

3. Finally, in case you do think that abolishing the Electoral College as we know it is a good idea, it is unclear how you plan on accomplishing that. This is not something that could be passed through an executive order (thank Heavens for small mercies), the only way to enact this would be through a Constitutional Amendment and one knows how hard that is. But that is a feature of the system – not a bug. Moreover, think about this for a moment – Republicans will hold the levers of power from Jan. 20 onwards in both the executive and legislative branches of federal government and they would hold unified control in about half of all states (http://www.governing.com/topics/elections/gov-republicans-add-dominance-state-legislatures.html)! I don’t need to remind you of what’s necessary for a constitutional amendment to pass but boy, are things looking precarious for the Democrats! In that environment (and in an environment of hyper-partisanship), I hope you would recognize  that passing constitutional amendments should be hard – really really really hard but that would also mean that your ideas of doing away with the Electoral College has exactly a zero chance of passage. Which is exactly how I would like it – because I respect the Constitution more than I care about the  vagaries of any political party or the outcome from one electoral cycle and because I also believe that Constitutional Amendments should pass only where there is an overwhelming national consensus on a topic and we are very far from such a consensus on what to do with the Electoral college. I for one (and I speak as a registered Republican) would be opposed tooth and nail to doing away with the Electoral College.

Responses are always appreciated but what’s even more appreciated is to see some of what I have said be reflected in your subsequent writings – maybe with the implicit or explicit acknowledgment that other reasonable people may hold points of view that differ from your own.

Sincerely,

Sutirtha Bagchi