How the Economic Machine works

I saw this wonderful half an hour presentation of how the economy works. Ray Dalio has done a wonderful job in keeping the concepts suitable for a layman. I have decided to prepare a similar module of how the economy and the world work, in smaller bit sized presentations, in order to understand and explain better. Before that, I need to prepare a flowchart of my current understanding of the economy, in a way that I'm able to explain it to a layman.

Outrage over Unilever Tresemme ad

Unilever withdrew the entire range of Tresseme products from South Africa, after outrage over an ad that depicted African hair as frizzy. Finally, some backlash against one of the many prejudices that continue to be practiced and promoted. Maybe this shall be the beginning of the end of such campaigns, considering that Fair & Lovely has been Unilever's leading product in the fairness cream market. We hope that such outrage translates into redesigning our outlook towards such bias.

Anti-defection law

I was watching The House of Cards, season one, the second time. Frank is looking to get his policy drafted into legislation, and works to get enough legislators on his side. In this effort he requests Claire, his wife, to speak to a couple of legislators, and convince them to vote in favour. Claire tells the two gentlemen to vote their conscience, as she has motive to see the bill defeated.

I was thinking of similar situations in India, where the party whip issues a whip to ensure that all party members vote the line of the party, failing which they may face expulsion from the party. The kind of conscience voting is simply not feasible here. And any member cannot genuinely have a different point of view on a particular issue, while agreeing or falling in line with party philosophy in general.

This also makes debates on such issues irrelevant, as members are forced to restrict their expression to the party line, and we may be losing out on valuable inputs from members, if there are any. And for the same reason, parties fear the anti-defection law. The anti-defection law was probably passed with good intention, to prevent corruption and cross-voting without adequate grounds. But it has gone against the principle of people representation.