T Sabri Öncü

The 2013 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences, wrongly called the Nobel in Economics, has evoked much comment about the apparently contradictory perspectives of two of the winners, Eugene Fama and Robert Shiller. The third, and least known among the winners, Lars Hansen, has probably made the more lasting of contributions to science, if not economics.

The upsurge of protest in Turkey is not the result of any deeprooted conspiracy or a few miscreants letting loose their animal spirits, as the government would have it. Rather, it is a spontaneous outburst of anger from ordinary people who have borne the brunt of the Erdogan administration's neo-liberal growth model for the last decade.

In August 2010, the then Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee sought to cut the government’s stake in the State Bank of India (SBI) from 55% to 51% and push the bank to raise more capital from the market. Good idea. But, in a course reversal, on 5 December 2012 – at a time when the government’s...