Green fuel, empty stomachs By Bjorn Lomborg Economic Times

Spectators at February's Daytona 500 in Florida, US, were handed green flags to wave in celebration of the news that the race's stock cars now use gasoline with 15% corn-based ethanol. It was the start of a season-long television marketing campaign to sell the merits of biofuel to Americans. On the surface, the self-proclaimed 'greening of Nascar' ( National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing )) is merely a transparent - and, one suspects, ill-fated - exercise in an environmental form of whitewashing for the sport: call it 'greenwashing'. But the partnership between a beloved American pastime and the biofuel lobby also marks the latest attempt to sway public opinion in favour of a truly irresponsible policy. The US spends about $6 billion a year on federal support for ethanol production through tax credits, tariffs and other programmes. Thanks to this financial assistance, a sixth of the world's corn supply is burned in American cars. That is enough corn to feed 350 million people for an entire year. Government support of rapid growth in biofuel production has contributed to disarray in food production. Indeed, as a result of official policy in the US and Europe, including aggressive production targets, biofuel consumed more than 6.5% of global grain output and 8% of the world's vegetable oil in 2010, up from 2% of grain supplies and virtually no vegetable oil in 2004. This year, after a particularly bad growing season, we see the results. Global food prices are the highest they have been since the United Nations started tracking them in 1990, pushed up largely by increases in the cost of corn. Despite the strides made recently against malnutrition, millions more people will be undernourished than would have been the case in the absence of official support for biofuel

Now, Salwa Judum in Buddha’s land? Tamal Sengupta, ET Bureau Jan 11, 2011, 06.40am IST

KOLKATA: Salwa Judum, or 'peace march' , appears to have made a silent entry into West Bengal, albeit on the sly. The system was introduced by the Chhattisgarh government in June, 2005, in the Dantewada district where the state administration armed villagers to combat the Maoists.
The anti-Naxalite people's resistance movement eventually received bipartisan support from both the opposition and the rural parties. State police even trained Dantewada villagers to handle firearms to take on the Maoists. However, the Chhattisgarh government had to face criticism from various quarters for taking such counter-terrorism steps.
Officially, the CPM-led government in West Bengal never hinted that it would introduce Salwa Judum. But, it appears, the party has silently introduced a home-grown version in the Maoist-infested Jangalmahal. "It appears the CPM-led government has given passive support to the party's bid to indulge in counter-terrorism ," said a political source closely tracking the developments

Economic Times; Extended lunch breaks can be a boon

In most companies, coffee-table conversations and long lunch breaks are considered a waste of productive employee time. But good leaders understand that if properly utilised and channelised, these so-called 'time-wasters' can actually be used to enhance organisational productivity.
The main objective of any organisation is to coordinate the actions of a group of individuals to attain a certain goal. This coordination does not happen automatically, but requires some effort since individuals do not collaborate on their own on goals that are outside their immediate purview. Initially, before the arrival of Classical Taylorism, this coordination was achieved through an abundant stock of social capital — a concept, typically used in economics that refers to connections within, and between, social networks. The core idea is that social networks inside organisations — be it a religious group or a cricket club — add a certain amount of value to organisations through the attributes they help build, like trust and goodwill between individuals. These values ensure coordination between individuals, though they may come from different backgrounds. Once management became a formal science, thinkers assumed that modern companies progressively would replace social capital-based, informal coordination mechanisms, with formal ones like management policies, hierarchies and bureaucratic rules. And as businesses started becoming more complex by the day, thinkers were quick to predict the death of social capital.............................

23 Jun, 2011, 03.59AM IST, NEERAJ KAUSHAL, Economic Times

Does money buy happiness? Are people living in rich countries happier than people in poorer countries? Does economic growth lead to happiness? Is it possible to measure happiness or well-being? There was once a time when such questions were left to philosophers to understand. Quantifying happiness was out of question; attaching a money value to it was blasphemy. And then entered in this field the scientist. Economics of happiness is now a growingly large field of research. Social scientists have begun to question the age-old assumption that all economic activity is in the pursuit of happiness to maximise what in economics jargon is called 'utility'. Economists have started measuring happiness, conducting statistical analysis to investigate the factors that 'determine' happiness and if money happens to be one of them. The Great Recession in Europe and the US and its painfully slow demise has led politicians to join the search for more appropriate measures of national well-being and happiness. The age-old metric of economic activity - the gross domestic product - is felling out of favour with many western governments. In September 2009, on the first anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, French President Nicolas Sarkozy asked other nations to drop their obsessions on GDP and a adopt measure of 'well-being' as the metric of progress. A year later, the British Prime Minister David Cameron asked the Office of National Statistics in the UK to produce an index to gauge the general wellbeing of the people by assessing their psychological and environmental well-being. A number of other countries, including Canada and Australia, are also considering developing such a measure. Cameron, however, wants to go a step further. He wants to use the new measure to steer public policy. The concept of measuring progress with happiness and not economic activity is not entirely western. The former king of Bhutan coined the term gross national happiness about four decades ago and the Bhutanese government has developed detailed surveys to measure it. American politicians, of course, have a greater faith in the market than fellow politicians across the Atlantic or up north in Canada. But they too are finding it hard convince the American public that GDP growth reflects prosperity of all. The US economy is in what seems to be a long phase of jobless (read: joyless) recovery with stagnating wages. The growth in GDP for the past few quarters, therefore, does not reflect the plight of the families most hit by the recession. Economists and psychologists are devising ways of measuring happiness and well-being. Alan Krueger, former assistant secretary for economic policy and chief economist of the US department of treasury, and psychologist Daniel Kahneman and colleagues have developed what they call the 'national time accounting' (NTA) - as opposed to national income accounting, which is used to measure income or GDP. NTA is based on surveys that involve asking respondents to keep a diary of their daily activity and record their feeling about each of the activity on an 'enjoyment scale'.........................................................................