How can Rising Prices be controlled?featured

by Yogesh Upadhyaya on 01.04.2014 - 02:19 PM

Our short video on Price Rise is out! How can rising prices be controlled?

As India’s great middle class struggles to keep pace with the escalating price rise, here’s an examination of it’s causes, and some possible solutions. Examining the causes of Price Rise and, more importantly, debating the “How” questions. Thanks Anu Hasan for brilliantly tackling and communicating this complex subject!

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2 comments

Manu Sharma AUTHOR1

For people who claim to raise the quality of debate it’s particularly important to get the big picture right as well as the details. In a comment left yesterday on power generation video (the comment is yet to be approved), I showed how the AskHow team got a crucial premise wrong.

In this analysis they get the complete picture wrong. The video purports to show the demand supply gap due to rising affluence as the primary reason causing price rise of commodities over recent years. This is precisely what conventional economists would have us believe.

Conventional economists are wrong. They do not get the energy economy linkage. Students of economics are never taught that that historically the crucial currency driving economic growth has always been energy.

In past centuries energy was always expensive but over the last 150 years with the discovery of crude oil and development of petroleum products energy was suddenly cheap, almost free. As a consequence we witnessed massive expansion of industrial society over the last 100 years.

That is, until about ten years ago when price of a barrel of oil started shooting for the sky. If you look at inflation adjusted crude oil price, its rate of growth over the last decade has been 25-30 TIMES higher than the average rate of growth over the last five decades.

This has domino effect on price of other commodities, businesses are affected, so is trade and so on. What we are witnessing in the world economy and in India is the result of a conflict between our economic model that is predicated on infinite growth and the finiteness of our resources, primarily oil being reflected in higher energy prices. THIS is the real reason why prices are rising and will continue to rise.

Don’t listen to conventional economists. They don’t know what they’re talking about. If you want to understand this, there are a plethora of books in the U.S and elsewhere on “peak oil.” In India most educated people, including economists, have never heard of this term but there’s a new book out called the Third Curve.
Radha krishan pandey AUTHOR2

U ol r fighting fr a gd cause hatsoff to u all

How can Rising Prices be controlled?featured

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