In catching up with blogging (I was both very busy and very offline for the last weeks) I continue in English with mostly some commented pictures. Please bear with me, the next more content-intensive post is coming up (even though it will be again in German I’m afraid). My 10 days or so in Kenya were very good, even though I arrived with a cold that kept me in the house for some days, and caught my second diarrhea in this year just a few days after recovering from the cold.

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This (for now) last India blog will also be an English-and-mostly-pictures one. Even though I feel in many ways I sped through the country and spent most of my time in different means of transportation, I’m happy I divided my time between „India“ and Auroville as I did, mostly staying and working in the latter. I also feel that it was good to take the traveling „slow“ (that is, slow means of transportation) even though I traveled fast in terms of moving on frequently. Sharing the time in transit with the Indians is I think an experience that tells a lot about the country and the culture. And I get the impression that Indians themselves do that a lot — they spend a lot of time in cheap public transport.

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This will be a post of mostly pictures, and as you see another one in English to not discourage anybody. Again, no promises for the future There would be much more to say about Auroville, but I don’t have much time right now, and am in many ways already so far away that I think my next writing on Auroville and India will be concerned with differences between my Indian and East African experiences. So for now just have a look…

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Greg Mankiw points to an interesting disagreement among high-profile blogging economists about whether it is possible to tax rich people who don’t consume very much (or who consume the same before and after the tax), or more precisely who actually pays if you do.

As I had previously tweeted, I was quite surprised by Joseph Stiglitz‘ remark that in his opinion there are some convictions that all serious economists should share: „resources are limited, incentives matter“. The context was that he didn’t agree with what many other distinguished economists held should be supported by everybody in the profession. Now, the problem with this greatest common denominator of his is that it is barely more than what I remember from a textbook as the definition of the discipline as being concerned with scarcity.

Is the situation of economics really so dire that after decades of science dealing with numbers from complete (non-inferential, every psychologist’s dream) real-world datasets, basic public policy issues are still in the realm of ideology? It seems so. Now, before (as usual …) arguing for a constructivist turn, let me put some of the central irreconcilable statements side by side:

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I take the opportunity of writing about an English book to do my first English travel-blog entry. I still can’t make up my mind how I will move on language-wise, being torn between connection with my friends all over the world and the feeling of integration I get from reflecting on my experiences in my mother tongue.

Maximum City had been recommended to me by several people who’s judgment I trust, and still my expectations have been surpassed. I can’t remember when a book last spoke to me so strongly on so many different levels of observations, experiences and feelings. I can basically use some quotations from it as a sort of diary of many of my own experiences. A non-fiction book of almost 600 pages, a report of an Indian expat to the US moving back „home“ to Bombay with his family, but to me that is only the starting point, for especially continuing to read it now that I have taken in my first week of Nairobi I can assert that it’s topics reach much farther. The book starts with some very good glimpses of what a newcomer sees in India:

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It must be old news for some, because the comic is actually from 2008, but I laughed very hard and at the same time felt it says a lot about our world in many ways. Oh well, here it is, thanks to XKCD:

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I sometimes have free time at my hands right now to read things that have been slumbering in the depths of my computer for a long time. And I rediscovered „The Devil’s Dictionary“, composed around 1900 by Ambrose Bierce and available for free in a horrible text format on Project Gutenberg. As one of my early ventures into search and replace with regular expressions and into LaTeX, I created a nicely typeset version of that, hereby to be put into the public domain. And some of my favorite definitions from it right here:

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I just came across a book with the promising title „Street-Fighting Mathematics — The Art of Educated Guessing and Opportunistic Problem Solving“ by Sanjoy Mahajan (2010), which is actually licensed under Creative Commons, so it can be found for free online. The basic premise is to provide some mathematical tools or heuristics to sufficiently approximate solutions to everyday problems (and maybe also provide a more general framework for that kind of reasoning). And it starts teasingly with a topic called „Dimensions“ and „The power of multinational corporations“. Here’s the problem:

In Nigeria, a relatively economically strong country, the GDP [gross domestic product] is $99 billion. The net worth of Exxon is $119 billion. “When multinationals have a net worth higher than the GDP of the country in which they operate, what kind of power relationship are we talking about?” asks Laura Morosini.

What is the most egregious fault in the comparison between Exxon and Nigeria?

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I stumbled upon a text that seems to be written for my thoughts right now — I read a little and thought a bunch about existentialism recently, but of course my perspective was influenced by what I’ve done before, and I think in terms of my philosophical foundation there is a lot of a person-centered counselor in me. So here comes an article „The Person-centered Approach from an Existential Perspective“ in that same volume of Existenzanalyse 2008–1 quoted in an earlier post, that points out the many areas of overlap as well as the substantial differences, and helps me to locate myself in between. I highly recommend the whole read, but here are some of my key points, on notable differences and additions of an existential approach to the person-centered stance:

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In his „Comments on the State of Psychotherapy Research (As I See It)“ David Orlinsky points to some old wounds in psychotherapy research (and in many ways research in psychology in general). I think it is worth re-reading every now and then while you are active in the field. Right now I discovered some stimulating words on the „Placebo Effect“, something I feel will be important to really understand and utilize in practice in the next decade. Unless we want to leave it to modern shamans of good and bad intentions.

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