Links ...

1. Pallavi Singh in Mint: Wage Woes: Teach at IITs -- Just for the Joy of It.

2. Paola Giuliano and Luigi Guiso in VoxEU: To trust or not to trust: The answer lies somewhere in the middle:

   We argue that the relationship between trust and income is not always increasing – instead, it is hump-shaped. Perhaps surprisingly, not only those who trust too little but also those who trust too much do poorly, economically speaking. The individuals who do the best are those with more moderate opinions about other people’s trustworthiness.

   Why? Our hypothesis is that people tend to think that others are like them when forming their beliefs about the trustworthiness of others. This results in two sources of sub-optimal behaviour. On the one hand, individuals who are themselves untrustworthy, because they mistrust, tend to make decisions that are too conservative and therefore miss profitable opportunities. On the other hand, highly trustworthy individuals are too trusting and, because of this, get cheated abnormally often and incur large losses as a result. Somewhere in between these two extremes of trust, there is a “right amount” of trust that maximises individual economic success.

3. Phil Baty in Times Higher Education: The sleeping giant is rising to challenge global order:

   The report, India: Research and Collaboration in the New Geography of Science, says that India lags behind comparator countries in both research investment and output.

   But the Indian Government aims to change that. Its five-year plan for 2007-12 includes a fourfold increase in spending on education compared with the previous plan.

   In 2009, government spending on scientific research accounted for 0.9 per cent of India's gross domestic product; by 2012, the figure is expected to rise to 1.2 per cent.

   The proportion of the Indian population holding graduate degrees rose from 2.4 per cent (20.5 million) in 1991 to 4.5 per cent (48.7 million) in 2005.

   Using data from the Thomson Reuters database, the report charts rapid growth in the country's research output.

   In 1981, India produced just 14,000 papers listed in the database, rising to barely 16,500 by 1998. But since then, there has been major growth to nearly 30,000 in 2007 - an 80 per cent increase in nine years.

   Jonathan Adams, director of research evaluation at Evidence, a Thomson Reuters business, described India as a "sleeping giant that seems to be waking".