Why Sam Altman Was Fired From OpenAI?

Read More

Undistributed funds worth over Rs 25,000 cr with SEBI in focus after death of Subrata Roy

Read More

Citigroup Board Chair John Dugan on Citi's largest restructuring in decades

Read More

Google, Microsoft bet on Indian startup Karya to make AI work for a billion users

Read More

Electoral Bonds in India: A Corporate Governance Perspective

The Election season is upon us again, and it is only fitting that The Supreme Court of India has taken up a clutch of petitions challenging the constitutionality of Electoral Bonds that were introduced in 2017 as a means of donations to political parties. 

The capital involved is expectedly huge. After all, India is the world’s fifth largest economy and the most populous nation that goes through a 5-year election cycle with an overlap between 28 state elections and the national one. Electoral Bonds, as a fund-raising instrument, are primarily targeted towards corporates – including public limited companies except for those run by the government. And while the constitutional bench of Supreme Court headed by the Chief Justice would evaluate it for constitutionality, it is important to conduct an analysis from the perspective of Companies Act 2013 as well as from the purview of good Corporate governance. This article offers an in-depth analysis of these implications. 

Historical Context 

Companies Act, 1956 permitted an entity to make donations to political parties but there were restrictions. Companies were required to pass a resolution and an authorization from the board of directors was necessary. For direct contribution to political parties, it was necessary to have an annual disclosure of the political parties that they have contributed to. And most importantly, the contribution could not exceed 5% of the average profit of preceding three financial years. 

It was also permitted to make indirect contributions to the political parties, such as contributions through an ‘electoral trust’. This route attracted lesser scrutiny and became the most preferred route. Electoral Trust Scheme, 2013 recognized these trusts. Usually, these were non-profit companies that were constituted solely for the purpose of political donations. These trusts merged donations from various entities into one large corpus and then donated to various political parties. Therefore, while it was possible to ascertain which individuals and entities donated to an electoral trust, the donations from the trust to the political parties could not be traced back to them.

The above screenshot is from an interactive infographic at The Hindustan Times. The graphic shows how Satya Electoral Trust and General Electoral Trust garnered huge corpus in the form of electoral donations. This corpus was than used to donate to a variety of political parties. In the case of Bajaj Electoral Trust for example, there is a 1-to-one correlation, but for the majority of the larger trusts it is virtually impossible to ascertain who donated to whom.

  

Regulatory Evolution 

Companies Act, 2013 relaxed the restriction of maximum donation from 5% to 7.5% of the average profit in the preceding three financial years. But the disclosure obligations were not modified or relaxed. The direct route attracted maximum scrutiny and the indirect route through electoral trusts and others remained the preferred mode of donations. Anonymity from public disclosure was allowed to foster, even when majority of the conduits were public listed companies, utilizing money from their reported profits for political donations without disclosing the recipients. 

The Finance Act, 2017, and the Electoral Bond Scheme, 2018, elevated this scheme of things to the next level. Among others, these bills brought in three sweeping changes: 

• Introduction of Electoral Bonds: A new specialized financial instrument was introduced in the form of Electoral Bonds. This is a promissory note that can be purchased from State Bank of India, and can be donated to a political party within 15 days. The note does not bear the names of either the purchaser or the recipient. While the SBI does comply with the RBI norms of KYC while issuing the Bonds, this information can only be retrieved through a court order. Even then, only the purchaser’s identity is revealed, and not that of the recipient political party. 
• Anonymity Provision: Electoral Bonds bypassed the disclosure requirements set by the Companies Act, 2013. While the Companies Act, 2013 necessitated that for direct contributions to political parties, identities of both the doner and the recipient must be disclosed, Electoral Bonds allowed for that disclosure to be avoided. In turn, this also made the indirect donation route using electoral trusts somewhat redundant, giving more maneuverability to doners. 
• Removal of Donation Cap: Most significantly, the Finance Act, 2017 removed the cap on the maximum donation that a company can make. Companies can now donate unlimited amounts, provided they have existed for more than three financial years. 

Legal and Ethical Concerns 

This brings us to the present scenario in the Supreme Court. Since the introduction of the Finance Act 2017 and Electoral Bonds Scheme 2018 various litigants have approached the apex court. The court is reviewing a clutch of these pleas. Reporting on the first day of the hearing, The Economic Times wrote,

Adjudicating on a clutch of petitions challenging the Centre's electoral bond scheme permitting anonymous funding to political parties, a bench headed by Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud orally remarked that electoral bonds facilitate anonymised "not just in relation to the donee but also in relation to the rest of the society." 

During the resumed hearing, the CJI, speaking for the bench, verbally observed that "in the case of a company, even shareholders won't be told who you are contributing to". 

Earlier this week, attorney general R Venkataramani, in a statement filed in the Supreme Court, had submitted that citizens do not have the right to information under Article 19 (1)(a) of the Constitution regarding the funding of a political party.

But with respect to a listed company the shareholders are not just ordinary citizens. They are invested stakeholders to the company that is utilizing the profits towards the said donations to the political parties. When one considered the fact that all restrictions towards the maximum donation has been removed by the last bill the situation becomes specifically acute. The checks and balances for good corporate governance have been sorely lacking. In an extreme scenario this could potentially mean that a company can disregard its shareholders in entirety while spending all the proceeds and profits towards an anonymous donation to a political outfit. The shareholders will be mere bystanders, lacking any instrument that help them question the decisions of the company management, let alone influence or prevent it. 

Best Practices for Better Corporate Governance 

Therefore, the following Corporate Governance best practices are suggested: 

1. Avoid Corporate Donations: Companies should refrain from political donations, leaving such contributions to individual promoters and management. Promoters and management may make their choice of donation in their personal capacity, which is different from utilizing company profits, which are shareholder money.
2. Digital Channels: If unavoidable, use Electoral Bonds for donations as they offer a formal, digital mechanism. To its credit, the Electoral Bonds provide for a more transperant digital mechanism, wherein the recipient political party must use official accounts to collect the donations.
3. Self-Regulation: Companies should voluntarily cap donations and disclose them to shareholders. Adhering to the previous limit of 7.5% or lower as a benchmark can be a good start. The Finance Act 2017 may not be mandating the maximum cap on donations, but the company must self-regulate and declare to its shareholders the maximum amount up to which it is willing to make donations to political parties.
4. Board Authorization: Maintain the practice of board approval and full disclosure. The formal procedure of passing the resolution and getting the authorization of the board, as well as robust disclosure obligation of the previous regime encourages good governance, and should be followed even when they are not mandated by the current law.
5. Transparency in Quid-Pro-Quo: Any potential reciprocal benefits arising from political donations should be reported to the board for review. 

Conclusion 

The ongoing Supreme Court case on Electoral Bonds brings into focus the need for a balanced approach that respects both the political funding requirements and the principles of corporate governance. 

The conflict of interest is apparent in the fact that an elected political government can enact laws that facilitate fund-raising for political parties even at the cost of good corporate governance. The judiciary must do the balancing act for the shareholders and citizens at large. Companies must exercise caution and adhere to best practices to maintain transparency and accountability. 

References and Further reading

• Shareholders won't know to whom co is contributing: SC
• Centre to Supreme Court: Public has no general right to know about Electoral Bond sources
• Electoral Trusts: How some of India’s biggest companies route money to political parties
• Electoral Bond Scheme, 2018: A Company Law Perspective 

Disclaimer: This article is based on legal frameworks and financial data up to the year 2022. GenAI was not used. An intern helped in collating data from the internet and provide references to make this post more accurate. 

Read More

Clay Christensen: How Will You Measure Your Life?

A tribute to Clayton Christensen, the Harvard professor who introduced "disruption" in his 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma, which, in turn, led The Economist to term him "the most influential management thinker of his time." 

Even more influential for some would be his 2012 co-authored book How Will You Measure Your Life?. [try here].

Christensen passed away in Boston on Jan 23, 2020.

Read More

The most famous Machine Learning MOOC of our time

If you haven't taken the Stanford's Machine Learning MOOC by Prof Andrew Ng on Coursera, you are less likely to be taken seriously in the AI community. Or so they say.

Somewhere in 2008 Andrew Ng started the Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE) program that placed a number of Stanford courses online, for free. Andrew himself was responsible for teaching one of these courses, Machine Learning, which consisted of video lectures by him, along with the student materials used in the Stanford CS229 class.

The "applied" version of the Stanford class (CS229a) was hosted on ml-class.org and started in October 2011, with over 100,000 students registered for its first iteration; and became one of the first successful MOOCs made by Stanford professors.

Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller left Stanford to co-found Coursera in 2012. The Machine Learning course was one of the key offerings on the platform. And it continues to be #1 (check here, here, or comprehensively here). 

Read More

Bezos' Five "Amazing" Points

JEFF BEZOS SPENT AN EVENTFUL TIME with his larger Amazon.com engineering team in India recently. The "events", so to speak, involved no less than a typical decorated delivery truck on one hand (The event where, apparently, his amazon.in CEO called out Jeff as his 'Baap' ^{[try here]}). And, on the other hand, there was him meeting with the Indian Prime Minister in Delhi and talking about things (in e-retail in the most promising e-global economy with the world's 3rd largest open internet userbase, of course).

In between these two was a private dinner organised with a dozen or so CEO's in Bangalore. This paraphrased post is thanks to one of them ^{[try here]} "minuting" the following five points that Jeff talked about among other things.

#1: What was the hardest moment of your life?
Jeff: My experience of raising the first million dollars to start Amazon.
Nothing over the following two decades of founding Amazon compared to that. I reached out to 80 odd investors and how they thought my idea of selling books over the internet was crazy.

#2: How do you hire people?
Jeff: I look at two things: one, does the person consider himself to be fortunate? And two, how good are they at making decisions without data... I'm biased and I prefer people who consider themselves as very fortunate [...] they will make or do things better because they are thankful to the way their lives are shaping up. The others will waste their lives looking over their shoulder and complain about how life is not satisfactory. “Those kind of people I don’t want on my team”. [...] While data is an extremely important element of decision making, you have to first listen to your gut, what feels right. Usually, the gut is right and you have to substantiate it with data. But you should not start the other way round, where you look at data first and then suppress your instinct and do what the data says. That will not necessarily make you do great things. 

#3: Would you hire a philosopher and/or an entrepreneur?
[Jeff pauses for a bit], I would hire a philosopher and not an entrepreneur. [...] a philosopher will take my mind where nobody else has taken it. And then, he will find the entrepreneur to make that into a reality. 

#4: What are the fundamental tenets of your business? 
Jeff: There are three things -
1. Customers rule: That is an obsession at Amazon. At any meeting that we have, we have a chair for the customer. I say, ‘there’s a customer sitting here, and are we doing things right for the customer?’.
2. An incessant appetite for innovation: This has to be there in every walk of life, and it’s not an annual activity, but an everyday thing: we have to do things better.
3. Operational excellence: When you are running a successful corporation, the fundamental building block is phenomenal operational excellence. Everything will happen the way it is planned to happen and that we actually execute and deliver on the promise. 

#5: What next?
Jeff: I’ve only just begun.
(For a perspective, today Amazon ranks #35 in Fortune500 list - compared to Google's #46, and Microsoft's #34). 

Read More

Cheers to Life!

Cheers to Life!

Read More

The Pygmalion vs. The Golem Effect

There are two kinds of self-fulfilling prophecies. They are broadly defined by wiki as follows:

The Pygmalion effect, or Rosenthal effect, is the phenomenon in which the greater the expectation placed upon people, the better they perform.

On the other hand is the Golem effect, in which low expectations lead to a decrease in performance.

In ancient Greek mythology, Pygmalion fell in love with one of his sculptures, which then came to life. The theme was in the main stray of many English literary works during the victorian era. One of which is George Bernard Shaw's play titled "Pygmalion" from which Rosenthal effect gets its name. In Shaw's play, the protagonist, a professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility, the most important element of which, he believes, is impeccable speech. (The play is a sharp lampoon of the rigid British class system of the time and a commentary on women's independence.)

When read along with Hawthorne effect, the two behavioral effects above become even more interesting. The Hawthorne effect (commonly referred to as the observer effect) is a form of reactivity whereby subjects improve or modify an aspect of their behavior, which is being experimentally measured, in response to the fact that they know that they are being studied, not in response to any particular experimental manipulation. (Of course, without much doubts the key-words and the theme thus far may have already reminded you of the Quantum double-slit experiment, which in itself is a topic for a new Bubble-game. Meanwhile, try here if you must.)

These effects, among others, constitute the broader macro psychology theory of human motivation and personality called "Self-Determination Theory" which concerns with people's inherent growth tendencies and their innate psychological needs, and attempts to study the motivation behind the choices that people make with/out any external influence and interference.

When applied to modern-day study of the economy, it brings us to the ongoing work by MIT professor Dan Ariely in the field of "behavioral economics". The following TED talk captures his ideas rather nicely around prevalent biases in human decision-making process and the term that he coined to describe the behavior: "Predictably Irrational". (My short book-review of the namesake shall follow as a future post.)

[Dan Ariely: Are we in control of our own decisions?]
NB: This blog entry is an example of "Bubble-game Theory"

Read More

Bubble-Game Theory

YOU CAN CONSIDER GOOGLE your friend only if the two of you play games with each other -- especially with Google the search box. I call our little game Bubble-game. The rule is simple. You need to come up with a vaguely familiar term that you know from somewhere -- desirably from within the Google Apps ecosystem that you personally use on various gadgets. Again, the only rule is that the term should be only vaguely familiar, if at all. It is not necessary to know the precise spelling.

So then, you turn to Google.com and ask. From within the context of your 'relationship' with Google, the algorithm would suggest to you the possible answers in the form of search results. And depending on how extensively you use Google --or, to put it more socially-- depending on how well Google 'knows' you, you should find traces in the search results that may indicate where you might have encountered the term for the first time and the subsequent info-branches it created thereafter: cached data, search queries, location information and frequently visited places, bookmarks and favourites, frequently visited sites, email and social circles, interactions and conversations you have had -- to mention a few. (For the complete list, you may want to review details in the public domain for project PRISM.)

If you have noticed, Google Now does something very similar albeit behind the scenes. Which in turn defines the bubble that you live and operate within inside a given app ecosystem. These informed results are algorithmically cultivated to "inform" you better. However, in the process, the algorithm assigns weights to certain information snippets to bump them up over others, and in doing so, it alters the reality for you.

It is my theory that over a period of time, pretty much like a chewing bubble gum one can effectively change the shape and size of this bubble. Since it was defined by your own habitual patterns in the first place, it can be redefined also. It would primarily involve controlling and altering one's digital information usage patterns around the given bubble. Typically, a bubble shrinks over time, making your behavior patterns more predictable. As you add milestones to your life such as acquiring a new degree, getting married, adding a newborn to the family, relocating to a new place, changing jobs, etc. would add additional dimensions and info-branching to the existing bubble. A significant effort may allow you to restrict the bubble from affecting your information consumption. However, there seems to be no way to burst the bubble unless the complete dataset is lost or disassociated with your digital identity.

Getting back to the Bubble-game, the term that Google and I played with today is "Rosenthal" (try here) -- a vaguely familiar term that randomly popped up in my head, most probably by unconsciously noticing Umberto Eco's book "The Name Of the Rose" on the bookshelf in the passing. The bubble involves a host of url's, bookmarks, comments, that I happened to capture a couple of years ago.

(PS: Eli Pariser demonstrated the bubble effect in his 2011 TED talk with striking examples. His ongoing research effort is updated on his personal blog - The Filter Bubble.)

Read More

"Peter Drucker - Managing Oneself" on SlideShare.net

IN THE INTRODUCTORY paragraph of this legendary paper for Harvard Business Review, Peter Drucker writes:

We live in an age of unprecedented opportunity: If you've got ambition and smarts, you can rise to the top of your chosen profession, regardless of where you started out. 

But with opportunity comes responsibility. Companies today aren't managing their employees' careers; knowledge workers must, effectively, be their own chief executive officers. It's up to you to carve out your place, to know when to change the course, and to keep yourself engaged and productive during a work life that may span some 50 years. To do those things well, you will need to cultivate a deep understanding of yourself - not only what your strengths and weaknesses are but also how you learn, how you work with others, what your values are, and where you can make the greatest contribution.

Because only when you operate from strengths can you achieve true excellence.

Marking a small footnote today as this 10-slides synopsis (below) of Peter Drucker's "Managing Oneself" crosses a sort of a mini milestone on SlideShare with a thousand+ downloads from 26k+ views overall since its first publication.
Thank you all.

Peter F Drucker - Managing Oneself - a synopsis

Read More

Cheers to Life

Read More

The Age of Innocence

(My junior)

Noble:

I see trees of green, red roses too
I see them bloom, for me and you
And I think to myself
What a wonderful world 

I see skies of blue, and clouds of white
The bright blessed day, dark sacred night
And I think to myself
What a wonderful world 

The colors of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky
Are also on the faces, of people going by
I see friends shaking hands, sayin', "How do you do?"
They're really sayin', "I love you" 

I hear babies cryin', I watch them grow
They'll learn much more, than I'll ever know
And I think to myself
What a wonderful world 

Yes, I think to myself
What a wonderful world
Oh yeah... 

~ Louis Armstrong

Real: http://youtu.be/CF3zDhm6EC8

Read More

Happy New Year 2013

Welcome 2013 as the twenty-first century moves into teen ages.

Season's Greetings,

and Best Wishes.

Read More

George Sugihara On Early Warning Signs

Earlier this month SEED magazine published this very interesting article by George Sugihara, theoretical biologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, on how deep mathematical models tie the events of climat change, epileptic seizure, fishery collapses, and risk management surrounding the global financial crisis. Excerpts:

[...] Economics is not typically thought of as a global systems problem. Indeed, investment banks are famous for a brand of tunnel vision that focuses risk management at the individual firm level and ignores the difficult and costlier, albeit less frequent, systemic or financial-web problem. Monitoring the ecosystem-like network of firms with interlocking balance sheets is not in the risk manager’s job description.

A parallel situation exists in fisheries, where stocks are traditionally managed one species at a time. Alarm over collapsing fish stocks, however, is helping to create the current push for ecosystem-based ocean management. This is a step in the right direction, but the current ecosystem simulation models remain incapable of reproducing realistic population crashes. And the same is true of most climate simulation models: Though the geological record tells us that global temperatures can change very quickly, the models consistently underestimate that possibility. This is related to the next property, the nonlinear, non-equilibrium nature of systems.

Most engineered devices, consisting of mechanical springs, transistors, and the like, are built to be stable. That is, if stressed from rest, or equilibrium, they spring back. Many simple ecological models, physiological models, and even climate and economic models are built by assuming the same principle: a globally stable equilibrium. A related simplification is to see the world as consisting of separate parts that can be studied in a linear way, one piece at a time. These pieces can then be summed independently to make the whole. Researchers have developed a very large tool kit of analytical methods and statistics based on this linear idea, and it has proven invaluable for studying simple engineered devices. But even when many of the complex systems that interest us are not linear, we persist with these tools and models. It is a case of looking under the lamppost because the light is better even though we know the lost keys are in the shadows. Linear systems produce nice stationary statistics—constant risk metrics, for example. Because they assume that a process does not vary through time, one can subsample it to get an idea of what the larger universe of possibilities looks like. This characteristic of linear systems appeals to our normal heuristic thinking.

Nonlinear systems, however, are not so well behaved. They can appear stationary for a long while, then without anything changing, they exhibit jumps in variability—so-called “heteroscedasticity.” For example, if one looks at the range of economic variables over the past decade (daily market movements, GDP changes, etc.), one might guess that variability and the universe of possibilities are very modest. This was the modus operandi of normal risk management. As a consequence, the likelihood of some of the large moves we saw in 2008, which happened over so many consecutive days, should have been less than once in the age of the universe.

Our problem is that the scientific desire to simplify has taken over, something that Einstein warned against when he paraphrased Occam: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Thinking of natural and economic systems as essentially stable and decomposable into parts is a good initial hypothesis, current observations and measurements do not support that hypothesis—hence our continual surprise. Just as we like the idea of constancy, we are stubborn to change. The 19th century American humorist Josh Billings, perhaps, put it best: “It ain’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that just ain’t so.”

Among these principles is the idea that there might be universal early warning signs for critical transitions, diagnostic signals that appear near unstable tipping points of rapid change. The recent argument for early warning signs is based on the following: 1) that both simple and more realistic, complex nonlinear models show these behaviors, and 2) that there is a growing weight of empirical evidence for these common precursors in varied systems.

A key phenomenon known for decades is so-called “critical slowing” as a threshold approaches. That is, a system’s dynamic response to external perturbations becomes more sluggish near tipping points. Mathematically, this property gives rise to increased inertia in the ups and downs of things like temperature or population numbers—we call this inertia “autocorrelation”—which in turn can result in larger swings, or more volatility. Another related early signaling behavior is an increase in “spatial resonance”: Pulses occurring in neighboring parts of the web become synchronized. Nearby brain cells fire in unison minutes to hours prior to an epileptic seizure, for example.

The global financial meltdown illustrates the phenomenon of critical slowing and spatial resonance. Leading up to the crash, there was a marked increase in homogeneity among institutions, both in their revenue-generating strategies as well as in their risk-management strategies, thus increasing correlation among funds and across countries—an early warning. Indeed, with regard to risk management through diversification, it is ironic that diversification became so extreme that diversification was lost: Everyone owning part of everything creates complete homogeneity. Reducing risk by increasing portfolio diversity makes sense for each individual institution, but if everyone does it, it creates huge group or system-wide risk. Mathematically, such homogeneity leads to increased connectivity in the financial system, and the number and strength of these linkages grow as homogeneity increases. Thus, the consequence of increasing connectivity is to destabilize a generic complex system: Each institution becomes more affected by the balance sheets of neighboring institutions than by its own. [...]

Try here for the full article. The article was originally published on Dec 10, 2010.

Read More

Revisit: Lewis Pugh's TED talk

Here is to revisit Lewis Pugh's amazing 10m "Radical, tactical shift" TED talk, declaring, "There is nothing more powerful than a made-up mind."

• See also:
• Go here for Lewis Pugh's personal pages.
• Go here for Pugh's TED profile, and here for the video on TED's YouTube channel.

Read More

Our Decision-making Process That Short-circuits Reality

From Ivo Velitchkov's Enterprise Architecture blog - "Beliefs and Capabilities": [try here]

"From the observable data and experience we select some and affix meaning to it. This forms the basis of our assumptions. And then we come to conclusions which in turn influence our beliefs. Our beliefs are the basis of our actions which bring more data and experience from which we select some, affix meaning and so on. We tend to believe that we affix meaning to the observable data, oblivious of the selection we always make. In a similar way we believe that we draw conclusions by clear reasoning, while we actually always apply some assumptions."

Beliefs and Capabilities:

The Inference Cycle:

See also:

• Go here for Chris Argyris's Harvard paper: Teaching Smart People How To Learn [PDF]
• Go here for SystemWiki entry - Ladder of Inference: Short Circuiting Reality
• Go here for Argyris's theories of action, double-loop learning and organizational learning

Read More

Neil Armstrong (1930-2012)

"It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small." — Neil Armstrong

Signature of Aerospace engineer Neil Armstrong, the "giant leap" guy who helped keep the moon relevant and  famous for science.

Read More

Peter Singer: The Ethics of Food

In this persuasive lecture on ethics about modern diet and eating habits, Dr Peter Singer, the Utilitarian philosopher and professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, highlights and questions ethical issues concerning food involving animals, its corresponding cost to the ecology and considerations for animal rights that the humans have been, perhaps rather conveniently, avoiding to acknowledge.

In his typical free-thinking, lets-face-it approach characterized by pragmatism rooted in down-to-earth reality, one can clearly bear witness to Prof Singer avoiding all possible temptations or invitations to indulging into any kind of rhetoric. Or so much as letting any sentimentalities enter into the frame of reasoning even while discussing gross cruelty to animals and the overall ecological impact it draws. The approach remains factual and clinical, and the presentation is driven by data in its most part. For philosophical indulgences around the issue, the Q&A section that follows offers a few interesting insights. Even there, the premise remains guarded, and avoids cliches including neutral, relevant, ones such as "what you eat is what you will become." Religious beliefs are kept outside of the arguments against factory-farm non-vegetarian diet.

The lecture is filmed at Williams College, Williamstown, sometime in Oct-Nov 2008 while the run-up to the then American presidential elections was in progress. Prof Singer begins by asking why, among all other ethical considerations debated in the public domain, the presidential candidates are not being questioned or judged on the basis of their ethical views on food? Today, as the American electorate faces another wave of persuasions and debates running up to electing the next president in Nov 2012, where incubent President Obama is hoping for his second consecutive term, this presentation remains as relevant as it was four years ago but with an added sense of deja-vu. The questions raised in the presentation remain the same, unresolved, and as previously, without considerations during the public debates.

Some of the aspects that have been discussed during this lecture include: i) How America, that was facing a hunger crisis in the 50s and 60s, has "solved" that problem to such an extent that the major issue which the American society is facing now is obesity. What are the ethics of obesity? ii) Why a ship-load of rice from Bangladesh to California is ecologically more ethical than Californians attempting to harvest the same quantity of rice themselves. iii) What are the ways for our society to transitioning towards a more ethical diet.

In conclusion of the lecture, the ethical choices and steps listed for a sustainable future for us, as well as for the upcoming generation, whose fate is linked with the global warming and hence is likely to be decided in next two decades, are as follows:

- avoid meat products from Factory farms (CAFOs) 

- prefer Organic, Vegetarian/Vegan or "Conscientious Omnivorous" diet, that use "Fair trade". 

- choose Local (seasonal) produce when you can.

• See also:
• Try here for the video on YouTube.
• Try here for Peter Singer's page at Princeton Uni
• Mentions during the lecture: try here for FairTrade (USA) portal, and here for VeganOutreach.org

Read More