Abhijit Iyer-Mitra

Captain Overage Activist This week, our journey into faux sociological terms continues. So far, yours truly has enamoured and enraged readers with three theories: the Higgins-Macaulay Complex, the Toaster Lover Syndrome and the Rang De Basanti Syndrome. For those who don’t ardently follow the Vine (shame on you), here’s a short recap: The Higgins-Macaulay Complex – named after Lord Macaulay, who wanted to create an English-speaking Indian second class, and Professor Henry Higgins, who was convinced the greatest thoughts flow only in Shakespeare’s tongue – is the misplaced belief that fluency in a colonial tongue, coupled with a sharp accent and arcane vocabulary, makes one superior in every way. The Toaster Lover Theory is the phenomenon created by the internet where people with absurd convictions find enough like-minded individuals to share their absurdity and start believing that the desire to perform coitus on an electrical appliance is normal behaviour and anyone who disagrees is a raging oppressive bigot. The Rang De Basanti Syndrome, named after the Dhurandar of the Left, is the anarcho-pacifist fantasy wrapped in the fig leaf of patriotism with the leitmotif of Rahman’s music that convinced folks that dreaming of revolution while protesting against the establishment automatically makes one morally superior, irrespective of whether one knows what one is protesting or has the slightest idea of what will happen after said revolution. Individually, anyone possessing any of these symptoms might be a danger to society, but put all three together and you get a full-blown version of an ailment that even Dr House cannot cure, because when all three intersect, we get the final boss archetype: Captain Overage Activist. timesofindia.indiatimes.com/…

As someone who has had GSDs as pets and loves them to pieces - its my favorite breed, let me say this - An aggressive GSD is a badly reared and kept GSD. GSDs are noble souls who have only one objective in their lives - to protect and safeguard their pack (that is you and your family). Having GSDs is as good as having another human being in your life. They understand what you say in plain language (mines understood Pahari/Kangri), they are sensitive to your mood swings and they practically speak with their eyes. And they need lots of hugs and cuddles. No unnecessary barking or creating ruckus. People think of them as attack dogs. They're not. They don't pick petty fights. They are calm and gentle as if they know their power. They are almost saint like in their demeanour. I mean, lot at the gentle soul in the video - sitting their all calm and composed listening to her rant. And that deep sigh - he's like, Bas Kar Behen 😁 They will silently watch over their flock (you and your family) and its assets. God forbid if someone tries to cross this boundary - because the gentle soul that you're used to becomes absolute terror. They are fearless and will take a bullet for you. Oh man! How I miss my dogs!

I've been pointing out since the early 2010s that Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman have a bad habit of biasing their data construction to fit their politics. Whenever they make a suspect call in how to handle stats, it ends up showing that inequality is on the rise. They almost never go in the other direction. The errors are non-random and almost invariably reinforce their political claims about rising income and wealth concentration since 1980. Piketty did this throughout his book Capital in the 21st Century. Piketty and Saez did this throughout their famous 2003 paper on inequality in the US. Piketty, Saez, and Zucman Saez and Zucman did this in their Distributional National Accounts paper that Auten and Splinter dissected. Saez and Zucman did this in their 2019 book on tax incidence and inequality. Saez and Zucman did this in their flurry of "studies" and white papers to support Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax proposal, California Prop 40, a new wealth tax in France, and dozens of other similar examples. A new AI report (linked below) audited 138 papers by Saez and Zucman. It found thousands of errors, 194 of which were serious. A whopping 97% of the serious errors went in the same direction: they showed inequality rising faster or made it higher. But there's a bigger scandal at play here. Despite these clear biases, Piketty, Saez, and Zucman have enjoyed a stream of praise and prestige within the economics profession. They get expedited and friendly reviews in top econ journals even though a more serious peer review should have caught many of these errors (the Quarterly Journal of Economics is a recurring offender in this regard). Journals regularly give them a pass after the errors in their old work come to light - they're never expected to correct any of it, and just keep on using it as if nothing changed. Their non-peer reviewed data claims are also treated as gospel by major media outlets such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. And they get showered with prizes - Saez and Zucman are both Clark Medal winners from the AEA, and Zucman got his prize in 2023 after evidence of major data shenanigans in his work came to light in 2019. Until now, those of us who have been trying to correct the record have had to wade through the PSZ trio's cluttered, disorganized, and often non-transparent replication packages (almost all of which are convoluted piles of Excel spreadsheets) to find the problems. I did a line-by-line replication of Piketty and Saez's entire 2003 US income inequality series to use one example, and found it was riddled with errors - almost every single one of which biased their results in favor of their political story. We had the means to catch this stuff as it was happening, but the economics profession failed to do its job. And it failed precisely because its elite ranks wanted to believe the Piketty-Saez-Zucman story for political reasons.

Imagine if Manmohan Singh had cracked down on Facebook and WhatsApp the way Modi is doing with Instagram today. Would Modi have made it this far?