Archives
(PRELIMS & MAINS Focus)
A NOBEL PRIZE FOR EXPLAINING WHY NATIONS FAIL OR SUCCEED
Syllabus
Prelims & Mains – ECONOMY
Context: The 2024 Economics Nobel was awarded to U.S. economists Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson “for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.” The prize committee credited the winners for enhancing our understanding of the root causes of why countries fail or succeed.
Background: –
Why some countries are rich while others are poor is a question that has been debated by economists for a long time now.
What is the significance of the work of this year’s economics Nobel prize winners?
According to the Nobel committee, the richest 20% of countries in the world today are 30 times richer in terms of average income than the poorest 20%. Various theories have been proposed to explain the huge difference in living standards in rich versus poor countries.
Some have blamed colonialism as the primary reason for the Western world’s prosperity. Others have argued that disparities in natural resource endowment explains differences in prosperity. Some others have argued that intelligence and even historical accidents could explain a nation’s fate.
The 2024 Nobel laureates, however, have argued that differences in the quality of economic and political institutions is what best explains the divergence in the economic fates of countries. This thesis is elaborated in the 2012 book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty written by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, and also in the 2004 paper Institutions as a Fundamental Cause of Long-Run Growth, written together by all three of this year’s Nobel laureates.
Why is the quality of institutions so important?
Institutions are the “rules of the game” that define the incentives that individuals face when dealing with each other. For example, institutions that stop the State from seizing the property of honest citizens would give citizens the incentive to work hard without the fear of expropriation and that in turn would lead to economic prosperity. Institutions that legalize expropriation, on the other hand, would affect individual incentives negatively and cause economic stagnation.
Now, Acemoglu and Johnson argued in their book that institutions can either be “inclusive” or “extractive”.
Inclusive institutions are characterized by secure private property rights and democracy while extractive institutions are marked by insecure private property rights and the lack of political freedom. They tried to empirically demonstrate that inclusive institutions lead to long-run economic growth and higher living standards while extractive institutions lead to economic degradation and poverty.
To this end, they studied the institutions that colonists set up in different colonies and the impact that they had. When a colonial power did not want to settle in a country for various reasons (such as higher mortality rates due to geography), it set up institutions that were extractive in nature. Example is the case of Britishers in India. But in countries where colonists wanted to settle for the long-run, they set up inclusive institutions that encouraged investment and long-term growth over short-term plunder. This may have been the case in the United States where the British set up institutions that promoted long-term prosperity.
It should be noted that institutions can also include factors like culture, which influence the more explicit “rules of the game” expressed by political and economic institutions.
If inclusive institutions are so good for growth, why don’t we have more of them?
Rulers face different choices in their respective countries. When the rulers of a country are able to safely extract resources for their personal gains through extractive institutions, the laureates argue, they have little reason to bring in political and economic reforms (or inclusive institutions) that can benefit the wider population over the long run. In such cases, extractive institutions prevail for a really long time as long as the masses do not revolt against the status quo.
What’s special about the Nobel prize given to Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson?
The economics Nobel prize is usually awarded for ground-breaking academic research into topics that are of significant real-world importance.
In the last two years, the Nobel prize was awarded to scholars who worked on important questions such as the gender pay gap and the fragility of the banking system. While these topics are no doubt important, they still do not delve deep enough into the more fundamental questions that economics as a discipline was founded to answer. This year’s Nobel prize corrects this flaw by bringing the world’s focus back onto the crucial topic of institutions, which determine the very “rules of the game” in any economy and thus affect literally everything that happens in it.
Source: The Hindu
SUICIDE AND MENTAL HEALTH
Syllabus
Mains – GS 1, GS 2
Context: Weeks after a final-year student died allegedly by suicide in his hostel room at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad, the institute’s students’ council has demanded setting up of a committee to probe into the circumstances surrounding the death.
Background: –
According to the annual report of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), 1.64 lakh people died by suicide in 2021 — an increase of 7.2 per cent from 2020. In the past three years, the suicide rate in the country has increased from 10.2 to 11.3 per 1,00,000 population. Most suicides in India are by youth and middle-aged adults — with 65 per cent of the suicides in 2020 being reported in the age group of 18-45 years.
Key takeaways
According to WHO, the link between suicide and mental disorders (in particular, depression and alcohol use disorders) and a previous suicide attempt is well established in high-income countries. However, many suicides happen impulsively in moments of crisis with a breakdown in the ability to deal with life stresses, such as financial problems, relationship disputes, or chronic pain and illness.
In addition, experiencing conflict, disaster, violence, abuse or loss and a sense of isolation are strongly associated with suicidal behaviour. Suicide rates are also high among vulnerable groups who experience discrimination, such as refugees and migrants; indigenous peoples; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex (LGBTI) persons; and prisoners.
The urgency to act to prevent suicides has been recognized and prioritized at the highest levels. The reduction of the suicide rate is an indicator in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (the only indicator for mental health), WHO’s General Programme of Work and WHO’s Comprehensive Mental Health Action Plan 2013–2030.
The first WHO world suicide report, Preventing suicide: a global imperative, published in 2014, aimed to increase the awareness of the public health significance of suicide and suicide attempts and to make suicide prevention a high priority on the global public health agenda. It also aimed to encourage and support countries to develop or strengthen comprehensive national suicide prevention strategies through a multisectoral public health approach.
In 2021, WHO launched LIVE LIFE: an implementation guide for suicide prevention in countries. Through the LIVE LIFE initiative, governments are encouraged and supported to implement a suite of evidence-based interventions and foundational pillars for suicide prevention.
The Government has released the National Suicide Prevention Strategy in 2022. The National Strategy for Suicide Prevention provides a framework for multiple stakeholders to implement activities for prevention of suicides in India. Strategy aims to reduce suicide mortality by 10% in the country by 2030. It includes an action framework with proposed actions with key stakeholders, implementation framework and mechanism, thus providing a path forward for preventing suicides.
The National Mental Health Policy (2014) sees prevention of mental disorders, reduction of suicide and attempted suicide as core priority areas.
The Mental Healthcare Act 2017 brought in some necessary changes. The Act effectively decriminalised attempted suicide, which was punishable under Section 309 of the Indian Penal Code. It ensured that the individuals who have attempted suicide are offered opportunities for rehabilitation from the government as opposed to being tried or punished.
Source: Indian Express
HABER-BOSCH PROCESS
Syllabus
Prelims & Mains – SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Context: A hundred million tonnes of nitrogen are now removed from the atmosphere and converted into fertilizer via the Haber-Bosch process, adding 165 million tonnes of reactive nitrogen to the soil.
Background: –
The Haber-Bosch process revolutionized agriculture by enabling the large-scale production of synthetic fertilizers, which significantly boosted crop yields and transformed global food production
What is the nitrogen molecule?
Nearly eight metric tonnes of nitrogen lie on every square metre of the earth’s surface, yet it can’t feed a single blade of grass. Nitrogen in the air is mostly in the form of N2. When two nitrogen atoms join together, they share three pairs of electrons to form a triple bond, rendering the molecule nearly unbreakable.
The energy required to break the nitrogen triple bond is so high that molecular nitrogen is nearly inert. But if the bond is broken, atomic nitrogen can form ionic nitrides such as ammonia (NH3), ammonium (NH4+), or nitrates (NO3–). Plants need these types of nitrogen, called reactive nitrogen, to synthesise enzymes, proteins, and amino acids.
How is nitrogen availed in nature?
Among natural things, only lightning has enough energy to destroy the N2 triple bond. In a lightning bolt, nitrogen in the air combines with oxygen to generate nitrogen oxides such as NO and NO2. They can then combine with water vapour to create nitric and nitrous acids (HNO3 and HNO2, respectively). Reactive nitrogen-rich droplets fertilize soil when it rains.
Apart from lightning, a gentle metabolic process carried out by Azotobacter bacteria can also create reactive nitrogen. Some microorganisms such as Rhizobia have developed symbiotic relationships with legume plants (clover, peas, beans, alfalfa, and acacia) to provide reactive nitrogen in exchange for nutrition.
What is the nitrogen cycle?
Plants usually get their reactive nitrogen from the soil, where they absorb minerals dissolved in water such as ammonium (NH4+) and nitrate (NO3-).
Humans and animals need nine pre-made nitrogen-rich amino acids from plants. The nitrogen ingested by plants and animals returns to the soil through excreta and the decomposition of dead bodies. But the cycle is incomplete: some nitrogen is released back into the environment in molecular form.
Although legumes can produce nitrogen independently, important food crops draw nitrogen from the soil. As the human population multiplies, nitrogen in agricultural soil depletes faster, needing fertilizers to compensate.
How is ammonia made?
Ammonia (NH3) is made of nitrogen and hydrogen, both of which exist naturally as two-atom molecules. Under extreme heat, the molecules separate and form a compound, but it is short-lived because of the heat. The reversible reaction N2 + 3H2 = 2NH3 (the ‘=’ sign has been used here as a stand-in for bidirectional arrows) must be maintained in specific conditions to harvest considerable amounts of ammonia.
The German chemist Fritz Haber heated the N2-H2 combination to various temperatures and calculated the amount of ammonia created. At 1,000 degrees Celsius, Haber found that harvestable ammonia made up just one-hundredth of 1% of the mixture.
Then Haber wondered if pressure could be the answer. He calculated that hydrogen and nitrogen would only remain united in extreme conditions: temperatures of 200 degrees Celsius and pressures of 200 atm (that is, 200-times the average air pressure at sea level). But the ammonia production rate was still too slow, so Haber wanted a catalyst. He also realised that if he could cool the ammonia to a liquid state, he could collect most of it.
What is the Haber-Bosch process?
Robert Le Rossignol, joined Haber’s lab, solving the engineering challenge of maintaining high pressure in the reaction chamber, while mechanic Friedrich Kirchenbauer built the necessary equipment. Haber acknowledged both in his Nobel Prize speech, sharing patents and prize money with them.
The heated hydrogen and nitrogen combination would circulate in a steel chamber at a pressure of 200 atm. The chamber had a valve that could withstand the high pressure while allowing the N2-H2 mixture to pass through. Haber also built a contraption to ensure the hot gases departing from the reaction chamber passed their heat to the cooler incoming gases. Thus the departing combination would rapidly cool while the ingested gas would be heated, achieving two objectives at once.
Haber soon began testing catalysts. One was osmium, a rare and dense metal found in trace levels on the earth. When Haber inserted an osmium sheet into the chamber, filled it with a N2-H2 mixture, and heated them, the nitrogen triple bond cracked away, leaving reactive nitrogen to fuse with hydrogen and produce a large amount of ammonia.
Haber tested uranium which worked well, too. However both osmium and uranium were very expensive. When Badische Anilin- und Soda-Fabrik (BASF), a German company, decided to upscale Haber’s experiment to a factory-scale operation, it st out to find a readily available catalyst and found that certain iron oxides were good catalysts. Finally, some brilliant engineering by BASF’s Carl Bosch turned Haber’s tabletop setup into an industrial process to produce fertilizer.
Source: The Hindu
ARTICLE 142
Syllabus
Prelims & Mains – Polity
Context: The Supreme Court on Monday (October 14) refused to entertain a PIL seeking directions under Article 142 to include sexual offences against men, trans persons and animals under the newly enacted Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS).
Background:
Article 142 of the Indian Constitution holds great significance in the context of the judiciary’s power and its relationship with the legislative and executive branches.
About Article 142
Article 142(1) states that the Supreme Court (SC) may pass any order necessary to do “complete justice” in any matter pending before it. This gives the SC wide discretionary powers to ensure justice is served, even in situations where existing laws might be insufficient or silent.
Article 142(2) provides the SC the authority to secure the attendance of persons, production of documents, and punishment for contempt of its orders.
Judicial Activism and Judicial Overreach
Judicial Activism: Article 142 is often cited as a tool for the judiciary to correct injustices when the law falls short, reflecting its activist role. The judiciary, using Article 142, has sometimes stepped into domains traditionally handled by the legislature and executive, leading to debates around separation of powers.
Judicial Overreach: Critics argue that in certain instances, the SC’s use of Article 142 encroaches upon the functions of the other branches of government.
Key Judicial Pronouncements
Union Carbide Case (1989): Article 142 was invoked to finalize the compensation for the Bhopal gas tragedy victims, bypassing procedural delays to deliver justice.
Ayodhya Verdict (2019): The SC used Article 142 to ensure a peaceful resolution to the Ayodhya land dispute, by granting the disputed land to a trust and allocating alternate land to the Muslim litigants.
Coal Block Allocation Case (2014): In this case, the SC invoked Article 142 to cancel over 200 coal block allocations that were found to be illegal.
Complete Justice: The Broad Scope
The phrase “complete justice” allows the SC to go beyond the limitations of statutory law. For example, in cases involving environmental protection, Article 142 has been used to enforce strict norms even when explicit legislation was not in place.
It also enables the SC to issue binding directions when existing laws are inadequate. For example, in criminal cases, the court has sometimes ordered the release of prisoners or alteration of punishments for humanitarian reasons.
While the power under Article 142 is extraordinary, the SC has noted that it must be exercised with caution. It should not contradict or bypass existing laws unless there are compelling reasons to do so.
Criticism and Debate
Undemocratic Power?: Some legal scholars argue that the broad powers under Article 142 may undermine parliamentary sovereignty, as the judiciary can effectively create law in certain situations.
Ambiguity in the Term “Complete Justice”: The lack of a clear definition of “complete justice” leaves significant room for interpretation, which has been both praised for flexibility and criticized for the potential for misuse.
Source: Live law
MOUNT ADAMS
Syllabus
Prelims – GEOGRAPHY
Context: Scientists are trying to establish what caused an unusual spike in earthquakes at the Mount Adams volcano by installing multiple temporary seismic monitoring stations at the site.
Background: –
In September, six small earthquakes were recorded at the “high threat” volcano. Normally, it only experiences one earthquake every two to three years, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).
About Mount Adams
Mount Adams is a stratovolcano located in the Cascade Range of the western United States, in Washington State.
It is the second-highest mountain in Washington after Mount Rainier, with an elevation of 3,743 meters.
Geological Significance
Stratovolcano: Mount Adams is a stratovolcano, which means it is built up by many layers of hardened lava, tephra, pumice, and volcanic ash. Stratovolcanoes are known for their explosive eruptions.
Cascade Volcanic Arc: It is part of the Cascade Volcanic Arc, a chain of volcanoes in the Pacific Northwest region formed due to the subduction of the Juan de Fuca Plate beneath the North American Plate.
Dormant Volcano: Mount Adams is considered dormant but not extinct. The last known eruption occurred about 1,000 years ago, and there is still potential for future volcanic activity.
Research indicates that Mount Adams has produced four lava flows within the last 12,000 years, all of which have remained within a few miles of the volcano.
The USGS highlights that the greatest risk to nearby communities comes from lahars—muddy flows of rock, ash, and ice—that can occur during both eruptive and non-eruptive phases. These lahars have the potential to travel significant distances, with historical flows thought to have reached far from the volcano approximately 6,000 and 300 years ago.
Source: Livescience
Practice MCQs
Daily Practice MCQs
Q1.) With reference to the Haber-Bosch process, consider the following statements:
It is an industrial process used for the synthesis of ammonia from nitrogen and oxygen.
The process requires high temperatures and pressures along with the use of a catalyst.
The Haber-Bosch process has played a critical role in increasing agricultural productivity by enabling the mass production of fertilizers.
Which of the statements given above is/are correct?
a) 1 and 2 only
b) 2 and 3 only
c) 1 and 3 only
d) 1, 2, and 3
Q2.) With reference to Article 142 of the Indian Constitution, consider the following statements:
It empowers the Supreme Court of India to pass any decree or make any order necessary for doing complete justice in a case.
The powers under Article 142 can be used by both the Supreme Court and the High Courts of India.
Article 142 has been used by the Supreme Court to provide relief in cases where existing laws were inadequate.
Which of the statements given above is/are correct?
a) 1 and 2 only
b) 1 and 3 only
c) 2 and 3 only
d) 1, 2, and 3
Q3.) Mount Adams, located in the Cascade Range, is known for its volcanic features. Which of the following statements about Mount Adams and lahars is/are correct?
Mount Adams is an active stratovolcano located in South Africa.
Lahars are volcanic mudflows that can occur even without an eruption.
It is part of the Cascade Volcanic Arc, a chain of volcanoes in the Pacific Northwest region
Select the correct answer using the code given below:
a) 1 only
b) 2 only
c) 2 and 3 only
d) 1, 2, and 3
Comment the answers to the above questions in the comment section below!!
ANSWERS FOR ’ 15th October 2024 – Daily Practice MCQs’ will be updated along with tomorrow’s Daily Current Affairs
ANSWERS FOR 14th October – Daily Practice MCQs
Answers- Daily Practice MCQs
Q.1) – b
Q.2) – c
Q.3) – b
