China's FDI (from The Economist)

CHINA'S share of the world's foreign direct investment (FDI) has risen from 1% in 1991 to just under 6% in 2009. FDI flows tend to go hand in hand with economic clout. Britain was a big exporter of capital in the mid-19th century. America played this role for part of the 20th century: its share of FDI peaked at 50% in 1967 but has since declined to 23%. China's share will no doubt keep growing. But it seems unlikely that it will be as generous an exporter of capital as Britain and America have been, at least in the medium term.

Why Socialism doesn't work

An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before but had once failed an entire class.

That class had insisted that socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.

The professor then said, "OK, we will have an experiment in this class on socialism. All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A.

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B.

The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy.

As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little.

The second test average was a D! No one was happy.

When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F.

The scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.

All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great but when government takes the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.

Could not be any simpler than that.

What a profound short little paragraph that says it all

"You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for,that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."

~~~~ Dr. Adrian Rogers, 1931

Fear of Losses

The latest issue of The Economist has an article about an experiment in behavioural economics. The management of a factory in China asked consultants to design a better incentive bonus system. Most of the consultants suggested fine-tuning the amount of bonus, but two behavioural economics researchers worked purely on the language of the letters through which workers were informed about their bonus.As an experiment, one group was told that if they met certain targets, they would get a certain amount of money as a bonus. Another group was told that they had provisionally been awarded a certain amount of bonus based on their capabilities. However, if their work fell below certain targets, then they would lose the bonus. In reality, the two schemes were identical.As researchers had suspected, workers who had been given the provisional bonus were much better at meeting the targets. The fear of losing something you already have is much stronger than the motivation to gain something new. This loss-avoidance urge is well-known to behavioural researchers in other areas like investments.The loss-avoidance urge is not a fringe phenomenon. It is absolutely central to what makes a good equity investor. The idea that some of the money you have earned may go away at any point is difficult to accept. There's a friend of mine who has been a steadily successful equity investor over many years now. He has this mental concept of 'market ka paisa' and 'mera paisa'. He divides the total worth of his equity investments at any point into these two categories, and generally considers about a fifth of the value to belong to 'the market', which the market can take back whenever it wants to.This has always enabled him to think clear-headedly about what he should be doing at any given time and has prevented knee-jerk reactions every time there's some volatility. In my experience, investors either have this kind of a mental framework or they tend to take wrong decisions under pressure. This is the kind of instinct that makes people sell off their investments after they have dropped and then not invest again till the climate has changed, thus making their losses permanent. As an investor, either one should have the self-awareness and the self-control to modify one's loss-aversion instinct, or one should go for investment products that are not prone to volatility. These can span conventional fixed deposit, or post office, type of products, or they could be products that have some type of equity elements. For example, there are some capital-protection oriented funds as well as funds that invest only gains from fixed income into equity.
Such schemes offer only a fraction of the gains that real equity products do, but they do earn more than pure fixed income while offering peace of mind, thereby catering to the loss-aversion instinct.An article from Valueresearch.

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