This is Nitin Pai's cyberspace.
The Acorn
Estd 2003
Recent posts:
To address the water crisis, India must price water
Water conservation requires multi-dimensional action -- but only pricing will create strong incentives for it | 8th Apr 2024
India cannot afford Piketty’s prescriptions
India should not be distracted from pursuing a sustainable high-growth path | 7th Apr 2024
The West’s disregard for global norms is endangering the world
Why should the rest of the world trust the West on climate and other global issues? | 25th Mar 2024
Power flows from the pins of microchips
Taking a step back to understand why national security types are concerning themselves with semiconductors | 11th Mar 2024
Hyperdiversity hardens Papua New Guinea’s challenges
Unless hyperdiverse societies develop a sense of higher-level imagined communities, they will underprovide even the most basic public goods. | 26th Feb 2024
Science fiction must escape the dystopia it has trapped itself in
We create the future we imagine: so it is important to imagine the future we wish to create. | 12th Feb 2024
Narrative Dominance, Information Warfare and the Freedom to Think
This policy brief offers a framework to analyse information warfare and underlines the importance of cognitive security | 1st Feb 2024
Why public places in India deteriorate over time
The missing sense of community is the underlying cause of many public problems | 29th Jan 2024
A nation is forged around dinner parties
Communal dining is the easiest pathway towards breaking age-old identity barriers that prevent the buildup of social capital. | 15th Jan 2024
Social capital is the fuel that Indian entrepreneurs require
Credit flows remain constrained by boundaries of caste and community. Public policy must address this problem. | 18th Dec 2023
2023 - The Year in Fiction
A rated list of 36 books I read and a further 41 that I opened. | 12th Dec 2023
When I tried to kill Mark Twain
A short story | 5th Dec 2023
Environmental goals are difficult to achieve without social capital
Getting international agreement on climate issues is the easy part; the difficult bit is getting hyperdiverse societies to cooperate at the everyday level. | 4th Dec 2023
The United States will continue to try to contain China’s technological progress
The Xi-Biden meeting in San Francisco did not achieve much, but showed Beijing's vulnerabilities in the geopolitics of high technology. | 19th Nov 2023
Leave firecracker policies to the state and local governments
A national ban on firecrackers is not necessary | 11th Nov 2023
The negative externalities of the war in West Asia
The effectiveness of mass terrorism, the acceptance of collective punishment and the West's loss of credibility will cast a long shadow on the 21st century. | 6th Nov 2023
A techno-optimist rejoinder to Marc Andreessen’s manifesto
We believe that the steering wheel is more important than the accelerator | 23rd Oct 2023
Some lessons from Hamas’s attack on Israel
Don't push the adversary to the wall, the enemy has a vote, walls are not a solution, cycles of violence make peace harder and pluralism is the answer | 10th Oct 2023
Championing pluralism will make India a vishwaguru
The 21st century world needs a better organising principle than national self-determination. | 9th Oct 2023
Diaspora politics has a messy dimension that will get messier
Extraterritorial political engagement comes with negative consequences for domestic politics and foreign policy. | 25th Sep 2023
Covert action is an instrument of statecraft
I am unimpressed with arguments that suggest that liberal democracies do not engage in targeted killings. | 25th Sep 2023
The essence of engineering
Engineering is a mindset that anyone can cultivate...even without an engineering degree. | 15th Sep 2023
Why I don’t like the word “hustle”
It might legitimise an amoral approach to business and normalise unscrupulous behaviour in the entrepreneural eco-system. | 11th Sep 2023
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