Hail Feminism !

Halla Tomasdottir managed to take her company Audur Capital through the eye of the financial storm in Iceland by applying 5 traditionally "feminine" values to financial services. At TEDWomen, she talks about these values and the importance of balance.



Girl Desi added her touch and evolved the discussion in feminine zone. (On Google Buzz)

I was thinking the 4 points she put forward are so much feminine from the minute a woman comes to know she is pregnant (wanted pregnancy not forced).

1- Risk Awareness: Every step a pregnant woman takes she measures the risk factors to the unborn. She invests herself with awareness of risks.

2- Straight Talk: She is told in very direct words, how her every action will impact the well being of the unborn. Direct, simple and straight words. And if she miscarries she is told directly no body sings songs to her

3- Emotional Capital: She invests emotions in the unborn even when she is physically uncomfortable, she has long term stakes in the unborn... not just give birth and get over with it...

4- Profit with Principles: She plans for a future of the unborn a future she'll be able to sustain for her child.

Quote of the Day :

I encountered “Everything that rises must converge” while reading Flannery O’Connor, one of my favorite writers from the American South. It is the title of one of her books. She was quoting Teilhard de Chardin, a Catholic priest. In my own life this expression has rung quite true, though the meaning I make of it may be different than theirs. Everything I have ever worked for, rising regardless of circumstances to do my best, has led eventually to the lives of other people who are also rising – sometimes against even greater odds than mine. Embracing this reality removes fear of striking out and upward. Everyone you truly wish to encounter will be there when you arrive (you will realize you have been rising together though on separate continents, perhaps, or even during separate centuries!) or will appear shortly thereafter.

There is much joy and celebration whenever we converge, i.e. meet each other. The spirits we knew. The faces we did not. Usually. ~Alice Walker

Ten Issues - 9

1- India's Telecom Scam: How Can a Corrupt System Be Cleaned? : The telecom scam that recently forced the resignation of telecom minister A. Raja defrauded the country to the tune of nearly US$40 billion. Since telecom is an industry that links backward and forward to several others, the total economic cost could well be hundreds of billions of dollars. This scandal shows that corruption has deep roots in Indian society, but informed voters and the democratic process can help eradicate it, argues Rajesh Jain, managing director of Mumbai-based Netcore Solutions, in this opinion piece.

2- Audre Lorde’s quote “anger is loaded with information” ; When you are at the wrong end of the unjust societies, many truths that are clear to you come out loaded with information. Read complete 6 page essay on Uses of Anger. Thanks to Anu.

3-The narcissism of the neurotic by P Sainath : The Commonwealth Games were no showcase, but a mirror of India 2010. If they presented anything, it was this — Indian crony, casino capitalism at its most vigorous.

4- This is not a panel discussion : Meet four Adivasi intellectuals whose lives have changed the politics and conversations about indigenous people, says G VISHNU

5-The Burden Of Knowing By Charles Hugh Smith: Knowing what lies ahead is a great emotional burden. The knowledge that the present is unsustainable is, for many of us, a great emotional burden. It troubles our sleep, our minds, and our basic emotional well-being. Knowledge, like memory, cannot be erased at will, and thus it runs in the background of our lives, unseen by others but deeply troubling to the knower.

6- Religious Excuse of barbarity by Johann Hari: If you are engaged in an act of cruelty, there is an easy, effective way to silence your critics and snatch some space to carry on. Tell us all that your religion requires you to do it, and you are "offended" by any critical response. Erect an electric wire fence around your nastiest actions and call it "respect".

7- Microfinance is under attack. Even the normally reticent pink newspapers have now begun to bring out the inherent flaws in the microfinance model.Check some facts here- MFIs: Profiteering from poverty and Five myths about microfinance.

8- When girls fear school by Kalpana Sharma: The reasons for the high drop-out rate of girls are simple: Fear of corporal punishment, sexual abuse and the lack of basic amenities like toilets in schools.

9- Valerie Plame, YES! Wikileaks, NO! : It is the American people who should be outraged that its government has transformed a nation with a reputation for freedom, justice, tolerance and respect for human rights into a backwater that revels in its criminality, cover-ups, injustices and hypocrisies.

So savor the Wikileaks documents while you can, because soon they'll be gone. And for the government criminals of the world, and for those who protect them, it will again be business as usual.

10- Meet Dr. Dani: One of the unsung heroes of our public service institutions : . Yet, there are people such as Dani in many of the small hospitals in the country, whose toils go unheard, and whose stories go unsaid.

Thought of the Day :
Julian Assange writes in his blog: “True belief is when a voice booms ‘the prisoner shall now rise’ and no one else in the room stands”.

Development is Uneven, Get Over It

Adapted from the blog post of William Easterly

This a 20 minute extemporaneous talk at UNICEF headquarters in New York on the topic of “Inclusive Growth”. After the talk, there is a question, comment, and response session with the audience.  The full video is an hour, if you are really a masochist. (Try this link if the video player above doesn’t work.)



To summarize the talk: success is intrinsically uneven, so development and growth is intrinsically uneven, not “inclusive”. (See the earlier post about the fractal stubborness of uneven geographic wealth.) In this talk, I also mention how remarkably uneven success shows up in just about every field of endeavor. One way this shows up is in a “power law”: there is such a strong negative relationship between the frequency of success and the scale of success that we have to use a logarithmic scale (i.e. a scale where every unit increase means multiplying by 10)  for both to be able to fit the extremes onto the graph, like the one below:



There is no evidence that large-scale redistribution programs can succeed without killing off growth, but targeting things like health and education to the poor has worked and could work even more. Lastly, the best thing of all you can do for “inclusive growth” is asserting the individual human rights of all, including women, gays, and religious, racial, and ethnic minorities. For more detail to fill out these ideas, please watch the video.

UPDATE: Answer to how many Beatles  hits out of 188 recorded songs on their 14 albums are hits today: 15. Even the most successful band in rock history could only produce a lasting hit about 8% of the time (please draw your own profound insights into the intrinsic unevenness of success and non-inclusive growth).