Remembering the Harvard Psychologist Who Taught Millions Where to Be

Baba Ram Dass (RD), born Richard Alpert in 1931, was an American psychologist who tried marijuana, Mexican mushrooms, psilocybin and LSD in trying to give meaning to his very comfortable but ultimately empty life. As the drug trips didn’t last more than a few days he decided to seek out holy men who might know more about these fleeting states of consciousness he had just discovered and which a 2,500-year book had described very accurately. His quest took him to an Iranian Sufi and eventually to Neem Karoli Baba (NKB), an Indian saint on whom big doses of LSD had no effect and who arranged for RD to get some solid spiritual training. 

The American returned to the US and a few years later published Be Here Now (pictured above) which has sold over 2 million copies since 1971. It is a book which influenced many people including the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs who travelled to India to try to duplicate RD’s experience.

What made Ram Dass special is not only that he combed through a massive amount of spiritual literature, tried a vast range of meditative practices and delivered loving-kindness in unusual locations but also that he explained so well what he had learned and experienced. His self-deprecating sense of humour makes listening to RD even more pleasant. 

He died in Maui, Hawaii exactly a year ago. His life journey has important policy implications.

Dracula to Vigorously Promote Vegan Diet

He announced this yesterday on a radio program in Transylvania. When asked what prompted such a big change he confessed that he was inspired by Ali Mansoor launching a grassroots movement and George Chung publishing another book. The count who refused to observe social distancing wore a brand new cape and the legendary four-and-half-inch fangs looked sharp as ever. Dracula also mentioned that he had applied for the top job at the National Blood Bank of Transylvania.

007 Dies Peacefully in Sleep After Living Twice

Renga At the Blackboard

To explain the mess proportional representation (PR) would throw Mauritius into after the Labour Party feared that the Governor would impose it. We’re in the first half of 1956 at the Port-Louis theatre or about two years before Seeneevassen passes away, Guy Rozemont had just died and the movement against PR is gaining steam. Dupré, the LP candidate, wins the by-election in the capital with 52% of the votes and this buries PR for good. So writes Sada Reddi in his 2000 biography of Sir Veerasamy Ringadoo, the longest-serving Finance Minster of independent Mauritius, its first President and who would have been 100 today. 

SVR has been unjustly painted as an incompetent Finance Minister (FM) of an incompetent government that had brought the country to its knees. The current economic contraction, forty years after the last one and when Ringadoo was Minister of Finance, will likely cast a more objective light on his performance. 

Doctor Who Gave Elephant Dose to Mosquito Fired

Seriously, a mosquito checks into a hospital because it’s not happy with its trademark hum and without doing any examination the doctor gives it the same giant injection of god knows what she administered to a hippo a few hours earlier. This has sent the poor insect into a deep coma and triggered an inquiry. It turns out that the doctor does this to every patient that visits the medical institution, big and small. The regular complimentary invitations to seminars organised by Big Pharma in posh locations may explain why an identical dose is applied each time. 

It’s not any different from the proposal of nominating 20 PR seats after each general election to correct any seat/vote share imbalance. Why would you use 20 MPs irrespective of whether you have a 60-2, 41-21 or 30-32? There’s no good reason especially when we know that this will create two types of political instability and blunt our democracy by preventing voters from keeping that many politicians out of parliament. Besides there’s a better and more elegant solution. 

Pope’s Warning Turns One

Francis visited us exactly a year today and celebrated a wonderful mass in honour of Father Laval in Port-Louis. Later in the day he told a gathering of the civil society and the authorities to move away from the idolatrous economy we had been worshipping (understand by this speculative FDI, record inequality, national problems not solved, not enough regard for the environment and a degraded public health system because trickle down economics had made government run out of money).

Twelve months later, how much of this common sense has been heeded?

Bizin Deklar Nu System Elektoral Kom En Trezor Nasyonal

The Only Thing Left For Ramgoolam to Do

He scrapped our progressive and sustainable taxation system in 2006 for an ultra-regressive flat tax which has almost bankrupted Mauritius and created massive inequality. 

He then tried to add a dose of proportional representation – worst thing for a Labourite to do – to our excellent FPTP system in 2014 which would have created chronic political instability and throw accountability away. Let’s not forget his wicked scheme of a semi-presidential system which would have added another big layer of problems at the top of the country. Just think of shop-till-drop AGF with more powers in 2018 or the tussle in 2012.  

Which makes him pretty much like one of the anti-independence PMSD people who also spewed out some very racist slogans like the one above (We don’t want Hindus!) in the run-up to the 1967 general election. While Mr. Ramgoolam hasn’t made any such statements yet he did tell a very derogatory story about Hindus (katora) during the 2019 general election which helped him lose the latter and his seat for the second straight time. So it would be a last natural and easy step for the 73-year-old plutocrat to end a disastrous political career. 

A Grateful Panther

Three Things to Make National Anthem Ring Truer

 1. Outlaw door-to-door religious proselytism. Freedom of religion includes freedom not be regularly harassed by groups of people of varying size trying to convert you. Religious belief should essentially be a private matter and a good indication of the absence of any hidden agendas is religious groups growing at roughly the same rate. This hasn’t been the case. Plus a citizen should not be allowed to change her religion before she’s 21.

2. Freeze foreign real estate speculation. Prices should be determined by local purchasing power of Mauritians, not by those of the wealthiest foreigners. Especially when we have a serious housing problem in the republic. We can add banning deproclamation of public beaches here.

3. Recall elections and a couple of other tools so we can get rid of lousy MPs between general elections and toxic policies before they hurt our country. This will keep politicians on their toes, improving governance.

How It’s Like When a Journalist Does His Homework

Bug Kin Eklat Depo Minisyon Pe Dir Mank Lapud Dan Fizi

Tan sa inpe. Pa komik sa? Inpe pli lwin li dir bizin fer kitsoz fuka. Be pa sa mem lin fer a partir 2006?

Reds Back on Their Perch After 30 Years

Boy, does this feel good! And apparently nobody is going to Switzerland. 

YNWA

Toxic Bean-Counter Says Hike of Top Tax Rates Won’t Work

People, he said, will just engage in more tax-planning or take part of the salary in stuff like a passage benefit. At the same he asked the Minister of Finance to make a u-turn because the flat tax has been a fundamental element of our success during the last fourteen years.

Well if it won’t work it’s kind of useless to ask Minister Padayachy to reconsider this policy decision. Plus passage and other benefits may be made taxable. Besides we can do a little research on how Sweden and other countries collect revenue with tax rates as high as 70% (we might look at our own history too as they were that high at one point in time). For sure I don’t see how two of his colleagues will spend a cute sum of money on air travel especially after Covid-19.

As for the success of his tax reforms he can start by answering two questions. 1. In how many years since 2006 did we get the promised 8% growth (he can tell us about 7% and 6% rates too); and 2. What has been the total impact if any of not reaching that target in terms of GDP and government revenue shortfall? 

Why New York is America’s Covid-19 Epicentre

Mauritius Should Showcase the Sithanen Flat Tax Hell

We should make sure all 50-odd African countries are in attendance along with two university buddies. Then bring up the above table on the screen while a fresh round of gato-pima is served. And explain that by the end of last year Mauritius had about Rs1,800 billion of GDP missing compared to what the 8% growth the flat tax was supposed to generate – that’s 36 times how much GDP is roughly expected to fall this year from where it was at the end of 2019. If we assume a very conservative 20% cut for government revenue and the monies are left in a drawer (they are not reinvested) then there is more than Rs350bn of government revenue missing. This could have been placed in a sovereign wealth fund (SWF) that would have easily got us over the bump in the road that the pandemic is now creating. 

But we should have increased the share of government revenue to the OECD average of 35% as our population has been aging since 2005, to improve our welfare state and to bring back retirement age to 55 years so we mitigate our serious brain-drain problem. This would have boosted the SWF to Rs623bn. Even if we had grown at 6.5% over the past fourteen years there would have been between 195bn to 342bn rupees available to prepare us for any tough situation. Why is 5% in the table? It’s our average growth for the fourteen years – a period of progressive and sustainable taxation – before Sithanen started screwing up the economy and Mauritius big time. So even in this worst case scenario there would have been Rs58bn-Rs101bn of extra government revenue available for a bad year like 2020. Without compromising the independence of the BoM, destroying our savings culture and sending our rupee into a tailspin. 

Minister Padayachy has increased personal top tax rates to 40%. He had little choice. We don’t want to have a massive social crisis. 

Savings Likely to Hit At Least 60-year Low

It was there already in 2018 when it matched the 9% it reached after intense cyclone Danielle inflicted a 17.6% contraction to the Mauritian economy. As the table shows savings increased by a tiny bit last year but not enough to avoid the top three worst spots before COVID-19 arrived on the scene. We must also note that SSR is the only Prime Minister to have his two entries in the table linked to two intense cyclones. The other three PMs appear there because of two things. The first is the Sithanen flat tax which has broken the economy. The other is the removal of the tax exemptions which the people of Mauritius had been using to set up their long-term financial plans. 

The situation for Pravind Jugnauth is pretty worrying as all his three years as PM are very bad years for this fundamental statistic of economic resilience. Given that the figure for this year will likely go at the top of the table he should bring back some basic common sense by restoring a sustainable and progressive tax structure and personal deductions. This should start compensating for his extremely poor economic management of the past five years. 

African Countries With the Worst Covid-19 Death Intensity

 

As shown in the above table Mayotte is the African territory with the highest number of covid-19 deaths per capita and that too by a large margin. Its figure for cases per million people was even higher than that for Spain on May 13. This is pretty bad given that it had only 6 cases on March 20. A weak health system is part of the reason. Not unlike in France where thousands of beds have been eliminated in hospitals during the last two decades.

Mauritius is at number four. We wasted precious time in the beginning when politicians were blurting out a lot of dangerous rubbish. We’ve seen how fundamental a good universal public health system is. We need to seriously upgrade ours. This involves a course correction. 

Why Our Government Hasn’t Been Functioning Properly

Three words. Sithanen flat tax. As it never produced the higher growth rates (8%) our central government has been piling up so much debt – increasing from a total of Rs106bn to Rs278bn between 2005 and 2018 – that it had to resort to creative accounting, push up the debt ceiling several times and has failed to solve many national problems. The USD has also appreciated by one-third against our rupee over the past 15 years. Not a good sign. Definitely not what you’d expect from a Tiger. But pandemics have such a way of bringing back sanity. 

Covid-19 Crisis Not Unprecedented

Nope. As the chart shows our GDP contracted by 10% in 1980 after cyclone Claudette visited us in the dying days of 1979. The contraction estimated by the Ministry of Finance for this year is between 7% and 11% so it’s going to be roughly the same. What’s going to be different is that since 2005 government has been working for the 1% while 41 years ago important components were being added to our welfare state helping tens of thousands of us have more meaningful lives. 

African Countries With No Covid-19 Deaths

As of yesterday there were a dozen of them. They all had people infected with the virus but so far have registered no fatalities. The infection intensity varies from 0.53 per million people in Lesotho to 522.01 in Réunion Island which is not independent.

Na Pa Tus Konze Travayer

Guvernman pe anvi kup konze travayer a koz covid-19. Fode pa li fer sa parski konfinman se pa en konze me en leksperians difisil kot dimun fin bizin res lakaz pu res an vi. Ena buku zafer li kav fer a la plas:

1. En konpayni pa gayn drwa diman kudme ek guvernman si li pan kup so dividen ek kup depans fla fla. Bizin usi kone komye fwa la pey ek benefis so CEO pli for ki travayer ek pli ti lapey. Ban aksyoner kav reinvesti dan zot konpayni pu kumanse.

2. En konpayni pa gayn drwa met dimun deor brit si li ena rezerv uswa fin fer profi u fin pey ban dividen egzazere ban dernye lane. Li bizin pa gayn drwa met travayer deor apre rod travayer pli bon marse depi lot pei.

3. Guvernman bizin introdwir en wealth tax ek remet taksasyon progresif.

4. Si bizin kup lapey u lavantaz ban travayer bizin fer li de fason progresif. Dimun ki gayn ziska 30,000 par mwa pa gayn kupe e dimun ki gayn 500,000 par mwa u plis kup ant 50% ek 75%.

5. Kansel tu privilez duti-fri pu loto pu prosen sink an.

6. Obliz tablisman plant manze lor zot later ek friz tu proze IRS/RES/PDS.

7. Friz dezyem faz tram ekspres ek pran kas ka don CEB pu li investi masivman dan soler/eolyen pu ki pri kuran vin byin pre a zero.

8. Remet laz retret 60 an kumsa kav angaz plis zen. 

Padayachy’s Obsession With Doing Business Could Prove to Be Politically Fatal

I mean Sithanen slashed top tax rates to get 8% growth and introduced the Doing Business Index (DB) as some kind of economic holy grail. When we never got the higher growth rates he told us it’s the fault of the Great Recession but they’d be on their way as soon as it ends. That downturn ended almost eleven years ago but still no trace of the 8% growth. In the meantime we’ve been bombarded with useful idiots presenting 3% growth as good. Even if it’s less than half the promised target while the country has been falling apart.

And Padayachy doesn’t talk about the 8% growth required to keep the regressive tax rates at all. He instead shifts our attention to the DB rankings trying to convince us that they are so important that we should aim at a top ten spot – we’re currently at the 13th place – and even a top five position. That would make sense if changes in the DB index were strongly correlated with growth. But as the chart shows they are not. At all. At least for us.

Now that the pandemic is here we’re all seeing how vulnerable the flat tax has made us and how close to bankruptcy our country is. 

Top 10 Worst Covid-19 Death Intensity in Africa

State Should Tighten Leaky Confinement Fast

Because we’ve wasted precious time, our public health system isn’t where it ought to have been – there are also several reports of frontline staff working in difficult conditions – and the virus is spreading at quite a rapid pace. The state should compensate for some of the blunders it made by having a free pack sent to the other 346,500 or so households so everybody has something to eat and stays inside for two weeks to slow down the advance of covid-19. The police/SMF/SSU and enough government employees can take care of the packing and distribution to every single household. Gas trucks should follow to exchange any cylinder for one that’s full (this will cost government only Rs80m). Staff should take down comments heard during the distribution so the system is improved quickly and other problems are solved.

How much would a healthy and reasonable pack cost? Given that we’re leaving the lobster thermidor out am guessing Rs1,500 to Rs2,000 should do the trick. So in all we’re talking around Rs850m here. Pretty cheap to help stem the infection and delay or avoid the collapse of our public health system. And this will be financed by more sustainable tax rates. 

Earth And Covid-19

Covid-19 Damage Across Africa Not Uniform

An Open Letter to Minister Dookun-Luchoomun

Dear Minister,

I read with interest on March 17th that your Ministry had made provisions for schooling for grades 7 to 9 to continue online using 994 videos and 70 questionnaires through the student support programme (SSP) should Covid-19 force us to shutdown schools.

As we already have our first three cases of that virus I am guessing the SSP will be extended to the other grades of the secondary curriculum. Considering that there might not be a lot of good news* coming our way for the next little while and that students could be at home for weeks if not months I would like to make an appeal that you allow all the students who didn’t get 5 credits at the SC level recently to go through into Lower 6 – which for now will be their homes – and have access to the relevant parts of the SSP. This will help soften the blow of the pandemic.

Thank you.
Best,
Sanjay Jagatsingh


*What Covid-19 Will Do to Mauritius, S. Jagatsingh, March 2020. 

How Will You Use Your Free Electricity?

“Je suis là pour travailler dans l’intérêt du pays

et tant que je serais ministre,

il n’y aura aucune baisse du tarif.

Que ce soit bien clair.”

Ivan Collendavelloo, 2016

The one the CEB will soon supply to you if it does a very average job of using current technology to make us benefit from our geography and topography. See, the cost of producing electricity using wind and sun has decreased significantly while storage has improved enough – one option is a giant version of your smartphone battery – to bring renewable energy close to base-load status. So two things should happen very soon. One is that the cost of electricity – by the way we’re talking clean power here – should fall and two it will be free and even negative on a increasing number of days.

This will require that we tweak our weather reports so they inform us of the expected daily electricity production and its cost which will in turn determine for example when we wash one or two extra loads of clothes and run our businesses a bit more intensively. Other countries like Germany and the UK are already there. We should too. To crawl back from the deep mess we’re in. And not waste another five years.

References

1. Prices Go Negative in Germany, a Positive for Energy Users, New York Times, December 25, 2017.

2. Government Programme 2020-24, Comments, S. Jagatsingh, Forthcoming, 2020.

At CERN, A Majestic Statue Reminds Us of the Work Done There

And here is Aldous Huxley’s beautiful take on it.

Another Reason Why Doing Business is Wrong Target For Mauritius

Why Are HSC Pass Rates Dipping?

SC Pass Rate Falls to 20-Year Low

As the chart shows it has fallen steadily in Mauritius for the last decade after stagnating for another one. The lack of progress in the latter has enabled a rapidly-improving Rodrigues to catch up with her bigger sister and even overtake her in 2011 – way to go Rodrigues! But things have deteriorated significantly there in the past four years with the pass rate collapsing to levels not seen in fifteen years. 

This is very worrying given that these pass rates don’t measure the entire harm done by our outdated educational system, one which relies too much on rote-learning. They definitely do not because for one Cambridge says 70% of the students have passed but the Ministry decides that 70% can’t progress to Lower 6. Besides the collapse is too significant to brush it aside with the recommendation that students should work harder. A better approach is required so that we fully grasp what’s happening and respond appropriately. This should include asking independent psychometricians to check if exam difficulty explains any of the mess. And listening to Ken Robinson who reminds us that intelligence has three characteristics https://youtu.be/iG9CE55wbtY. But not before the Minister of Education makes an evaluation of the 3-credit policy public. 

Finally a former Education Minister mentioned recently that most of the HSC laureates come from well-to-do families thereby confirming that the underprivileged have the odds stacked against them. These can be improved by allocating these scholarships to poor:average:rich in the ratio 45:35:20 after bonds are reinstated. The current setup might also need to be reviewed.

Two Governors and A Rupee

How to Burn Billions

Why Dookun-Luchoomun Must Allow 3 Credits to Go Through This Time

Because she doesn’t want to make a massive blunder like Nando Bodha did in early 2015 when he scrapped the point system without assessing its effectiveness and replaced it with a more ‘user-friendly’ alternative. As the chart shows road fatalities for the past five years have never been lower than the level they reached in 2014. Unlike in Singapore (in green) where they’ve fallen in every one of those years save 2018 when they increased by two. In fact if we had managed to have their cumulative number of fatalities over that period – which is setting the bar too low given that they have four-and-a-half times more people than us – we would have saved 75 lives between 2015 and 2019. Mr. Bodha has also been working hard to make the traffic Frankenstein meaner and road-users have already noticed that his tram which he calls a metro didn’t solve anything as expected. 

Instead, Ms. Luchoomun should rather want to take 2020 to properly assess the life and academic trajectories of those thousands of citizens that were allowed in Lower Six with three credits for a number of years and to compare them with those of their friends that had a few more credits. This will provide her with the hard facts of the matter, essential ingredients for good decision-making. My hunch is that there will not be a big difference between the two groups. Definitely not large enough to take the kind of risk the Minister is currently assuming. Too much is at stake here. The more so that we may currently have the worst substance abuse problem in our history and our old industrial education system that relies too much on rote-learning is not adequate anymore for a hyper connected world. Besides Cambridge has computed that 70.93% of the most recent SC-takers have passed their exams – these overlapped an election campaign. That’s 13,235, not 5,518, and therefore means that the British examiner has deemed that even 2,129 of the 3,092 who got 1 credit have passed. Government should in fact allow everyone who took these exams to either have a place in Lower Six or in a polytechnic and to move ahead – Jony Ive isn’t going to be there forever.

Ms. Luchoomun will also want to contact the OECD fast so we participate in PISA 2021 and find out if we have improved from the 56th place we clocked in Maths in PISA 2009, the only time we ever participated in this serious survey. As for the 5 credits needed by the PSC they can be kept but arrangements must definitely be made so that SC exams are available every three months or better still online. The blah blah blah about the necessity of shutting out any student without five credits otherwise we’ll end up with a stupid elite will die out rapidly if we consider two facts. The first one is that our savings culture was killed by someone who did very well in his HSC Economics exam and then proceeded to the LSE on a special scholarship when one Kher Jagatsingh was Minister of Education. The other is that a Minister who has a first degree in law wanted to literally sell our clouds because he didn’t like the CWA hotline.

Worried parents should of course get in touch with their MPs and Ms. Luchoomun. Because we don’t have recall elections yet. 

Mauritius Gets 2nd Three–Cornered Fight

Flat Tax to Cause Rs78bn Hole in Treasury This Year

Because we’re definitely not getting the 8% growth rate promised to justify maintaining the destructive 15% uniform rate. Which would explain why we’ve hit a new low in the exercise of our sovereignty. And things will get worse every year with the shortfall rapidly rising to Rs136bn by the time we vote again in 2024. This means a cumulative shortfall of Rs528bn for the next five years bringing the total since this folly started in 2006 to Rs882bn. 

This leaves very little time for Mr. Padayachy, the new Finance Minister, to bring back our public finances on a more sustainable track. A new budget this month would help prevent his political career from going into free fall.