Foreign residents of India do NOT need to link PAN with Aadhaar to file income tax returns

Of interest to a very specific niche, but I couldn't find this information anywhere on the public web, so I'm posting it here. I just got a dire email about how my PAN would be made "inoperative" if I didn't link it with my Aadhaar card, which I don't have. 

I called the hotline, and they told me that I wouldn't need to. In fact, they sent a follow-up email reading: 

However, the Central Government vide notification dated 11th May, 2017 has notified that the requirement of quoting of Aadhaar / Enrollment ID shall not apply to the following individuals if they do not possess the Aadhaar / Enrollment ID: 

• An individual who is residing in the state of Assam, Jammu and Kashmir and Meghalaya.
• An individual who is a non-resident as per the Income-Tax Act, 1961.
• An individual of the age of 80 years or more at any time during the previous year. 
• An individual who is not a citizen of India. 

For all other, it is mandatory. In case, you have any reservation on this aspect, you may approach the Judiciary for specific relief from application of the above provisions of law.

In Soviet Russia, Investments Shop You

The inestimable Matt Levine has, as usual, an astute analogy:

A brokerage is an investments store; you come into the store to browse for investments to buy, and the friendly helpful salesperson steers you to some good investments. If it turns out that the friendly helpful salesperson was just steering you to the investments that paid her the highest commissions, knowing full well that they were terrible for you, then you’d have some reason to feel aggrieved. But you cannot expect her to be your full partner in investing, your trusted adviser who always looks out for you. Her job is to sell you investments, and she gets paid each time you buy an investment.

One thing I like about Matt Levine is that when he gives a description like this, he clearly acknowledges that this is the way it is because of law, policy, and custom. He happily acknowledges it could be different, even if he doesn't think that's a good idea.

There are people who are supposed to be trusted advisers! They are called “investment advisers,” and they are different from brokers, and they are held to a higher and more fiduciary-like standard, and they generally get paid on some sort of fee basis for giving you advice rather than on a commission basis for selling you investments. And lots of people are dissatisfied with this system and want the brokers to be regulated more like advisers. And I suppose that there is some case for just banning retail brokers and requiring anyone who sells investments to retail customers to be a fiduciary adviser, but there are some good arguments against that too—it might make investing more expensive for small investors, for one thing—and the Securities and Exchange Commission has never been all that into it.

However, I wonder if he missed an alternative possibility this time. Why should stockbrokers promote securities at all?

(I have a hazy idea of what a stockbroker is, truthfully. When I want to buy securities, I go to Schwab.com. Is that a stockbroker? I assume stockbrokers are brokerage websites for non-Internet-users or, alternatively, for investors who want securities more sophisticated than the ones I buy on Schwab.com. I think my mom had a stockbroker at some point. He sounded like a rapacious dude.)

If I walked into an investment store, I would want them to hand me a copy of the National Harmonized Catalog of Securities and let me browse quietly. Maybe they could answer questions if they were a high-end investment store. I would want them to answer truthfully, just like I would want a restaurant to answer truthfully when I ask "does this have pork?"

The problem with banning advertising is that it deprives consumers of potentially useful sources of information (ha). But if I want to see arguments about whether Security A or Security B is best, why would I care what the shopkeeper thinks? I might want to see the best arguments from Security A and the best arguments from Security B, or I might want to consult an external expert. So sure, let companies plaster the subway with advertisements for their stocks. And let's make the investment stores into spartan, Eastern bloc-style ration shops.

(I do not actually endorse this as a sincere policy recommendation--I have no expertise here) 

"You have seen this diagram."

This image was in at least one and I think as many as three of my history textbooks:

But I had no idea it was drawn up with activist intent. From Adam Hochschild's stellar Bury The Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery:

Incapable of not organizing, Clarkson founded local offshoots of the abolition committee while on the road. The chairman of one new branch he set up, in the port city of Plymouth, soon produced something that immediately spread excitement in antislavery circles. ... The "plate" was a diagram, with top, side, and end views, of a fully loaded slave ship, the Brookes, owned by a Liverpool family of that name, which carried slaves from the Gold Coast to Jamaica. 

With the help of James Phillips and other committee members, Clarkson reworked and expanded the diagram. ... As in all its work, the committee took great care not to exaggerate: the diagram showed 482 slaves, although on several earlier voyages, under "tight-packing" captains, the Brookes had carried anywhere from 609 to 740. The diagram began appearing in newspapers, magazines, books, and pamphlets; realizing what a powerful new weapon it had, the committee also promptly printed up more than seven thousand copies as posters, which were hung on the walls of homes and pubs throughout the country.
...
You have seen this diagram.

Another gem (from the same page!): "[Lafayette] once told Clarkson, "I would never have drawn my sword in the cause of America if I could have conceived that thereby I was founding a land of slavery"

And this:

[During public hearings prior to the first parliamentary debate on the slave trade] James Penny, a former captain, made the slaves on the Atlantic crossing sound almost like cruise passengers: "If the weather is sultry, and there appears the least Perspiration upon their Skins, when they come upon Deck, there are TwoMen attending with Cloths to rub them perfectly dry, and another to give them a little Cordial. ... They are then supplied with Pipes and Tobacco ... they are amused with Instruments of Music peculiar to their own country ... and when tired of Music and Dancing, they then go to Games of Chance."

Striking to me that the public and the Parliament were so clueless that this could fly. But the important question is: do lobbyists and PR firms lie quite so brazenly today? I think the answer is probably closer to yes than no. At any rate it is a helpful anecdote to recall whenever you are feeling intellectually generous towards someone with skin in the game.

The book is the best history book I read last year. It is complimented well by the In Our Time podcast on the Lancashire Cotton Famine. Coincidentally as I type this I understand Manchester United and Liverpool are duking it out. 

A Dynamic Theory of Procrastination

I'm a solipsist: in the following paragraphs, the words "You", "We", and "I" both mean the same thing. And it's not what is traditionally meant by "you."
--
I feel like my best thinking last year was on the topic of grit. Where does grit (seem to) matter? Procrastination.

In the past couple months, I've been working a lot on grad school applications. This is painful and difficult for me. Self-promotion doesn't come very naturally to me--there was a time in my adolescence when it did, but I did too good a job of convincing myself to take the critical view of myself. So now I have to show off, and I want desperately to avoid it.

The popular culture understands counter-productive spirals of self-loathing and avoidance. And indeed these are likely a big part of why many people procrastinate. You feel bad about not doing something, so you try to avoid thinking about it, so you feel worse, so you try harder, and so on.

I have a hypothesis about a different dynamic, and I think it can be framed in a way that helps shed light on other procrastination forces, like the destructive spiral. At the heart of my framing is the Standard. The Standard is the level of quality that you expect of yourself. But it's not what you believe yourself to be capable of--let's call this the Belief, instead--it's what you believe you should be capable of. The Standard is tied to moral judgments about yourself.

I attribute procrastination to having a higher Standard than a Belief. I have a very specific feeling/experience in mind: sitting down to write but rejecting every thought and every sentence on the basis that it's not good enough. It's really a debilitating experience! However good your intentions, however gritty you feel you are being, nothing is ending up on the page. You quickly become convinced your intentions are not good and you are weak in the ways of grit. And whether you try to work or not, you are not working.

Let's assume a deadline. With any deadline, absolute or negotiable, one of two things happens. Either you make the deadline or you miss it. I've experienced both. What determines which it will be? Let's start with this question for the exposition of the model.

Notwithstanding the common assertion among the undergraduate class of the decadent West that they do their best work under pressure, in many areas of life quality of output is well understood to be an increasing fuction of time spent. We understand that the closer you get to the deadline, the less you will accomplish. And this knowledge can operate on either the Standard or the Belief, or, most usually, both.

An utterly rational person effectively doesn't have a "Standard;" if you're really rational, you don't carry around an idea of a moral obligation that impedes you from doing what you want. They only have an estimate of what they can accomplish--you need this in order to be able to plan. A rational person understands that as their time remain declines, the quality of work they can produce will decline, at least after a certain point.

That's not interesting; this post is not about rational people. It's about me. I'm not completely insane: I have an idea that the quality of my work declines if I don't have enough time. But I also have this separate sense of a Standard which I expect of myself. For a number of reasons, my Standard might be a different function of time.

To begin with it, it probably starts out either higher or lower than my Belief. There are few tasks I go into thinking, "Man, this is exactly the level of difficulty for which I am prepared". Much more common are: "Oh, of course I've got this, I know how Excel formulas work" or "Oh crap oh crap how on earth can I possibly present this research when I don't really know anything about the field?". So let's graphically represent confidence and doubt as different y-intercepts for the Standard and the Belief.

On top of that starting place, these functions can often have different shapes. Nothwithstanding what I wrote above, I actually don't think it's so unusual for the Belief to be constant. In fact this makes sense: far enough to the left, time remaining isn't an important variable and we should expect the Standard and the Belief both to be constant.

They might have different shapes because either the Standard or the Belief might begin to drop off earlier than the other. I may be overconfident about my writing and believe I only really need a couple days to write something as good as anything I can produce. But I still might start getting quite nervous and even desperate as the month I budgeted to write this stupid essay becomes a week. And if that desperation manifests itself as willingness to accept a less-good essay, than my Standard is dropping.

Something like that is what I think of as the typical scenario. That's what I noticed happening as I tried to work on my first grad school essays. At a certain point, without worrying that I would really be able to write them well enough, I did get worried about the time remaining and persuaded myself to accept something less polished. Indeed, I said to myself, you can submit total garbage, you just have to write something. And from that point I was able to get to work.

With writing, setting your Standard low is a very good strategy, because once something is written you can still do a lot of work on it. As an aside, these have been the first pieces I've written where I saw a very distinct first phase (or perhaps second after outlining) of "generating raw material" before actually producing a draft. I wrote twice as much as I needed to--freely and without hesitating about quality or relevance--for each one and later cut things away. Carving marble statues probably requires different procrastination management techniques.

There are probably other dynamics. I also do miss deadlines. I think this can happen when your Standard doesn't drop. If I'm faced with doing something very public, like preparing a poster presentation, I'm pretty likely to end up bowing out. However desperate I get, exit seems like a better option than perceived shoddy work. And a lot of the time, my self-doubt makes it feel like anything I do will be shoddy work.

The model may even be a useful framework when extended beyond deadlines. In that case, the interesting bit is probably the relationship between the Standard and the Belief, or their respective relationships with a third variable. Are there projects you never undertake because, in certain domains, you will never be able to accept outcomes at the level you think you can produce them? For instance things that only really seem worth doing if you have mastery? Or are there projects that you will only undertake within a certain time window of conceiving them--or else, for some reason, your aspirations have grown too far beyond your confidence?

Blogging not Siaya: The Eunuch and Political Order

When I was living in DC--in the summer of 2012--the book that was all the rage in development policy circles was Acemoglu and Robinson's Why Nations Fail. In fact, I had first encountered it right after it came out, when a classmate was bemoaning that it had only appeared as he was finishing up his thesis on some related topics. Still, I didn't read it at that time. Instead, I read another new book on politics and inclusion, called The Origins of Political Order, Volume 1, by Francis Fukuyama.

Why Nations Fail, the book I would only read later, turned out to have a few interesting historical tidbits. But when I did eventually get to it, it struck me as a pretty banal argument in favor of liberal democracy, repackaged as "inclusive institutions": these (relatively ill-defined) "inclusive institutions" were the key pre-conditions for economic prosperity.

But the book by Fukuyama--whose name has become a byword for the kind of liberal democratic triumphalism embodied by Why Nations Fail--had real substance. In a nutshell: the main challenge throughout history to the durability of political regimes has been the family. The professionalism and efficiency of states or other political structures tends to weaken as the people who wield power and wealth seek to accumulate it and pass it down to their progeny. Eventually efficient empires and bureaucracies "decay" (Fukuyama's word) into tribes and fiefdoms.

The Origins of Political Order is largely a fascinating survey of the mechanisms employed by various regimes to resist political decay: it goes over the Catholic church's rules on lineage and cousin marriage, the Turkish institution of the Janissaries, and ... well, those are the ones I remember. Probably also the Chinese civil service. Underlying that, though, it has a powerful thesis, whose relevance for our time is perhaps debatable but which seems to have a lot more to say about what "inclusive institutions" really are than Acemoglu and Robinson. I never understood why they got all the attention and Fukuyuma got none. The public discourse missed out on a powerful historiographical concept as a result.

This is on my mind today as I listened to an In Our Time episode. This is the BBC's terrific hour-long history podcast that gets three historians from UK universities together on a subject of their expertise and tosses in a well-read host who asks hard questions. The particular episode that had me thinking about political order (and my frustration that Fukuyama hasn't gotten enough credit for the great thinking he's doing now that history is over) was titled "The Eunuch."

There should be a pretty visible straight line from Fukuyama as I've summarized him to "The Eunuch." You want eunuchs running your empire and your empire's army because they aren't going to try to take over a chunk of it and hand it down to their sons. And you will be partly wrong, because they may start adopting children in large numbers and creating the same kinds of problems you had with your intact civil servants. Fukuyama describes a similar process among the Janissaries, who were originally prevented from passing their status to their children (they may have even been prevented from marrying--I can't recall).

Bizarrely, these brilliant historians didn't really seem to talk about it in this way. One was asked, for instance, where the idea of the giving the eunuchs greater authority for managing the state in Assyria in the 8th century BC had come from, and she could say only that it was one of many creative reforms the Assyrians implemented at that time as their best and brightest considered how to strengthen the empire's institutions. Yet to me, there is a very clear logic explaining why a king would endorse something like this.

I like to think I give historical contingency its due. Things happen for plenty of reasons, and if you've ever tried to run a regression on a social science dataset, it's very easy to be skeptical of all-encompassing theories of history. However, when a historical institution re-creates itself again and again, there may be a general principle at work. I think the political decay dynamic is pretty likely to be a real one.

Working hard is hardly working

It's survey time at Farmers' Skills, and that means the last month or so has been demanding. More demanding, actually, than anything I've faced before. Zoomed out far enough, that's exactly what I would have wanted from my sojourn here -- why put my lovely Boston life aside for something less -- but boy is it tough.

"Tough" means I frequently -- constantly -- feel like I've screwed up something important. Maybe I've forgotten about something that needed to happen, or I just can't remember how a problem was dealt with, or I am not focusing on the most important tasks, or maybe I just haven't worked efficiently and now I've run out of time. This feeling, needless to say, is not pleasant.

In the midst of all this, I end up spending a lot of mental energy on trying to assess if I am doing OK. (In fact I once saw a therapist who concluded that this was the heaviest weight on my happiness, which continues to seem wholly plausible to me). Putting aside the fact that this is a fool's errand, figuring it out means I need a yardstick or a standard, and the conventional wisdom on this, though wise, is trite: don't compare yourself to other people, just compare yourself to yourself and what you want to be. Some people may know the story of the Rat and the Ox (or is it the Elephant? Nope, that's not the point).

Maybe "trite" is too strong. But I am writing about this because I've had an idea here that I think could be useful, at least for me. The insight between the statement "Just try to be better than you are now, don't worry about other people" is that everyone is starting from a different place, with different endowments and different experiences, and so comparisons are dominated by those factors, and thus they are worthless. (The other insight is that it's impossible to know what is really going on for someone else, so the comparison is even more worthless). We right-thinking advocates of human freedom and fulfillment are more interested in how far someone gets in their journey, not necessarily where they end up.

Another way of saying that is that we see will as the great virtue. At least, we are only really interested in accomplishments that can be attributed to a person's "own doing". We moderns aren't really impressed with you for winning the lottery. A medieval or an ancient might see things differently, but that's not the audience I'm writing for.

We hvae some confused ideas about will, and they make "Be better than X" a tough prescription to follow. Take the naive interpretation of will, think of grit and gumption and sticktoitiveness, think of Protestants and their work ethic, and "Be better" easily degrades into "Try harder".

A propos of nothing, on my trip
to Nairobi I learned that I am
not the only person in East
to come up with this terrible
pun.

"Try harder" certainly matters sometimes. If you're running track, trying harder--not just at the time of the race, but every day of your life up until the race as well--matters. And it also matters for what some may consider loftier affairs: academics are infamously hard workers, yada yada. (Relatedly: I think Scott Alexander's practical symposium on the subject of innate ability vs. grit is interesting)

But sometimes "Try harder" is a distraction. When I am frustrated at myself for not keeping track of which field officer did the cost/benefit exercise in which village, I promise to myself to be better organized. But I'm already trying to better organized, and to write more things down, and every time I don't it's because that promise is competing with other promises of the same nature. It's obviously even more apparently useless when I say to myself, "man, I just need to pay more attention and remember things better." That obviously is not something in my power to do.

I can add that this isn't only something that comes up in moments of frustration. I can just as easily be feeling inspired when I say to myself, "Man, I'm feeling good, the next few months I'm going to be keeping my head on straight and just staying laser-focused on every task I'm doing when I am doing it." Again, utterly useless.

These things are useless because they aren't actionable (jargon-retch). Sometimes you actually know how to act on them: which new technology or technique to use to focus or remember or organize better. The rest of the time, you probably have some idea how you could find out about the right things to do to improve.

Now the issue has shifted subtly. It's no longer a question of trying harder, it's a question of figuring out the right thing to try. In other words, we're concerned with a decision. And the ability to make good decisions itself depends on what you know or know how to find out: one of these things like focus or memory or organization that you can't improve, willfully, at the drop of the hat.

Yet it also depends on something else, and this is where I think we can broaden the concept of will productively. That "something else" is the ability to overcome internal obstacles to making good use of what we know or know how to find out. And speaking for myself, I can attest that those internal obstacles are often significant and numerous. Every time I say "That's just not the way I do things," one of them is rearing its ugly head. When I decide to keep banging my head against the wall instead of asking for help or switching gears to another task, there is a nasty internal obstacle at work.

Also a propos of nothing, I mentioned Nairobi--did I mention
the elephant orphanage?

I don't have a choice between "be well organized" and "be disorganized". But I do have a choice between "try putting everything in Google Calendar for a week" and "keep making haphazard lists because that's what I know". Or, probably more meaningfully, between "try to figure it out on my own" and "make a habit of asking people to show me how they keep track of what they need to do". And I think this choice can be every bit as meaningful as the choice between, on the one hand, giving into the dearest desire of your burning calves and your rising nausea as you round the last bend in a race and, on the other, gritting your teeth and driving yourself forward by pumping your arms because your legs hurt too much to think about.

Both categories of choices really are choices--regardless of your situation, you have the ability to choose. That means that we, as individualistic freedom-loving moderns, should give them (and them alone) moral weight. And they are really the only determinants I can see of whether I do "better" or my counter-factual does--that's the Rat and the Ox standard.

I call the ability to overcome one's hostility to learning "openness", but there may be a better term for it. It's sort of surprising to me to find myself placing openness, something I would typically label a hippie virtue, alongside grit and stick-to-it-iveness, but it seems like that is where it belongs.

Blogging Siaya: Fundi-mentalism and cheap labor

A week or two before I went home for Thanksgiving, we had some electricity fluctuations that had the lights flickering on and off. The next day, some of our laptops weren't charging, and the AC adapters were wet with something that smelled like antifreeze. There was another expat around the corner, also affected, who was just about to start training her staff--so this was not far from catastrophic. I despaired, and tried to get Finance to procure me a new power adapter ASAP but it seemed like it would take a few days or a personal trip to and from Kisumu.

Eventually, rummaging around our storeroom (I'm still not sure I know all it contains), I found the adapter for another laptop that put out the same voltage. The plug wasn't right for my computer's power jack, but I got an idea. "I bet," I thought to myself, "I can take these to the battery charging station and electronics repair shop across the street and have him splice the connector from the broken adapter onto the other one." I thought I was a genius.

This repair shop, by the way, is about the width of a closet.

I walked over, introduced myself to the owner, Shadrack, and explained what I wanted to do. He could do it, but wisely suggested checking the new charger to see if it put out a charge. It didn't. Darn.

Shadrack, once a lecturer at the college
across the street, now the proud owner of
a repair shop. Because it pays better.

But! that was not the end of the story. Shadrack was convinced he could repair the adapter. He pried it apart, revealing a small circuit board. Shadrack quickly determined one of the capacitors had burst and was leaking electrolytic fluid. An hour later he had cleaned it with solvent, let it dry, and put it back together--it worked like new and he charged me $1.50.

That was a shift in perspective. I had just been thinking of the charger as a black box of plastic stamped together on some Chinese assembly line. But clearly it was a device that could be understood and repaired. I quickly brought Shadrack the second burned out adapter.

It's a fairly commonplace belief that we now have a "disposable culture" in the US, which is different from how things once were. I don't think anyone is surprised to see poor people getting more use out of the little they have than the rich. My experience here certainly bear that out; in addition to fixing laptop chargers, people also eat organ meat (they call it matumbo).

The reason we throw things like burned out chargers out is that time (whether labor or convenience) is expensive, and things are cheap. In Siaya, the reverse is true: time is very cheap--most people can't find much work and their back up is working on a near-subsistence farm) but things are comparatively expensive. Especially manufactured and imported things.  

That is one of the most foreign things about being here; although directly linked to the poverty, the low cost of time and labor is more persistently jarring and odd to me than the outright destitution everywhere. I see it featuring in lots of little oddities of life: a beer or soda at the store costs as much as it does in the restaurant, for instance. Or when I offer to buy someone lunch, they are just as happy if I bring them a meal to-go after I have eaten as if I sat with them at a restaurant. Or people in general being very willing to wait around.

Siaya and environs are teeming with people like Shadrack, or like Boaz, my bike mechanic. There's a Swahili word, fundi, which more or less means "craftsman;" that's how anyone plying a trade like this is referred to. There is a tailors' row in Siaya town, and also a barbers' row. They are even out in the middle of nowhere. I was riding along a rural road, and my bike chain started slipping off every few hundred yards. The third time it happened, there was a mechanic sitting under a tree with his tools on the side of the road. He fixed the problem for 20 cents and I was back on my way.

Boaz, bike and motorbike fundi, also asks sharp questions
about American race relations.

 
One of the ways I have heard the story about disposability told is that in the glorious past, we built things to last and we knew how to take care of them. This may have been true of 1950s America, but it isn't really true here; most manufactures are of pretty poor quality. And it makes sense that they would be: that's how you make something cheap. The seat of my new bicycle was not well attached, and from the very get-go the chain occasionally loosening and starting to fall off repeatedly has been a problem. But when it costs 20 cents to fix, and there is a bike fundi at every other corner, it makes sense that the equilibrium is for low quality goods.