A search engine syndrome?

Or something else? The readers of my blog, please help me. I am suffering from the following syndrome. The symptoms are... I dont memorize things purposefully which can be quickly found on the web with the help of a search engine. Any docs watching this blog? Help me out to get rid of this. For example, my friend told me about Gurucharan Das recently and two books he wrote that were quite popular - you see... I already forgot the book names because I know the keywords to describe the books. I know that he wrote this popular book that has a word Elephant in it, and another one that took examples from Mahabharata, relates human qualities to characters in Mahabharata. Since I know all these keywords, I just dont want to remember the names of his popular books. I think its really really bad on me !!

by the way, checkout his blog: http://gurcharandas.blogspot.com/ .

Man... I need to overcome this syndrome. Alright, his popular books are: Difficulty of being good: on the subtle art of Dharma, India Unbound, The Elephant Paradigm.

GDP and GNP

Following post is a courtesy from the text book Macroeconomic Policy Environment by Shyamal Roy.

We all know that GDP is Gross Domestic Product. It is a measure of economic activity in any country. GDP is simply calculated as sum total value of all goods and services produced in that country. It is usually measured every year, but of late due to volatilie economic conditions, it is measured every quarter. Ofcourse, more than the absolute number, the rate of change in these numbers every quarter is what makes interesting for stakeholders.

Now, what is Gross National Product (GNP)? GNP is simply the total value of goods and services producted by the residents of a country, irrespective of their geographic location. For example, people employed in Infosys India, goes abroad and earns money will be counted in the GNP of India, but will not be part of GDP of India. Let us say this employee is working in USA, his income will be part of US GDP and GNP of India. Now, you might say is it true for NRIs? No, the GNP is calculated only for resident Indians. So, obviously if this employee is staying beyond 180 days, his income will not be part of India's GNP.

Let us consider one more interesting number called, Net Factor Income from Abroad (NFIA). This number is very easy to derive (theoratically). Just take all the income earned by residents of India from rest of the world and subtract the income earned by non-residents of India in India. Currently this figure for India is negative, which means the income earned by foreigners in India is more than the income earned by Indians in outside India.

Do you now see the link between GDP, GNP and NFIA? Can we say, GDP = GNP - NFIA? Do you want to think how? Comment me if you dont get it.

Are you serious? Do you really want to blog that way?

check it out...

http://www.ted.com/talks/yossi_vardi_fights_local_warming.html

Whats Local Warming?

Get a mac campaign..

Youtube has become increasingly popular among corporates as a new medium of their marketing and advertising. Check out the new Get a Mac campaign in You tube.. few ads that I could not stop myself laughing out loud are..

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrJTiAwpM6I - ask what you can give to Vista, not what vista can give you

2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNnX6XRQBec&NR=1 - movies made on a PC

Moral Hazard and Adverse Selection

Economists refer to this term 'Moral Hazard' as someone's behaviour is not observed, then it affects the probability or magnitude of the payments. For example, if your car is fully insured, then you are less likely to be careful while driving. Or if you house is fully insured against theft, you will be less diligent about locking doors or installing an alarm system.

Adverse Selection is a form of information asymmetry. For example, in used car market, the seller of the car knows much more information than the buyer. When making a purchase, buyers view all cars as 'medium quality', in the sense that there is an equal chance of getting a high-quality or low-quality car. Because of such asymmetric information problem, low-quality goods drive high-quality goods out of the market. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as the lemons problem. Another example is, how insurance companies sell premium. They hope that there are more healthier people taking policies than less healthy people so that the costs are averaged for Insurance companies and they can make some money too.