October 05, 2018 Friday
Bedtime Story
Hitler on the Treaty
These are the very words of Hitler in his
1925 Main Kampf.
“What a use could be made of the Treaty of
Versailles…
How each one of the points of that treaty
could be branded in the minds and hearts of the German people until sixty
million men and women find their soles aflame with a feeling of rage and shame;
and a torrent of fire bursts forth as from a furnace, and a will of steel is
forged from it, with the common cry: “We will have arms again!””
I had to digress so much because I felt
there was a strong need to explain a little bit about the brain who had
revitalized the poem “The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Public
Benefits” and thus gave a new gush of life to the nearly dead poem.
In fact not only was this poem given a new
breath of life but it also went on to become a central part to Keynes’ theory
of economics which also brought explicitly out the idea of the paradox of
thrift or the paradox of savings.
The paradox when stated in terms of
prisoner’s dilemma can be put this way:
While saving is beneficial to each
individual it is deleterious to the general population.
This is called a ‘paradox’ because the idea
is counterintuitive.
It would be natural to assume for most
minds that what is good for the individual if spread over to the entire
composite must be similarly beneficial for the entire population.
However that may not be the case as Keynes
puts it.
In his 1936 magnum opus ‘The General Theory
of Employment, Interest and Money’ Keynes swerved dramatically from the basic
idea of classical economics that the level of employment in a society is
dependent upon the price of labor.
Instead Keynes made a case for the
aggregate demand being the primary driver of the economy of a nation.
(For most of us today this idea does not
sound novel for we arrived on this planet when this concept has become pretty
much an established and accepted proposition more so after the demise of the
Soviet Union and all its accompanying Communist Bloc).
He asserted that an economy with full employment
would shrink or contract if the people in it were consuming lesser goods than
what was being produced by it.
This contraction would continue until the
production would come down to the level of the consumption and equilibrium
reached.
Yet another novelty that was proposed by
Keynes in the ‘General Theory’ was the relationship between savings, investment
and liquidity (which means money).
According to his analysis the desire to
save is largely a function of the income, which is to say that the greater the
earning of people the more they will set aside either in form of cash in their
homes or in form of bank deposits.
The profitability of investment (through the
banking system) is dependent, according to him, on the interest rate.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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