This article first appeared in the Indian journal Economic and Political Weekly on 13 November, 2021.
Fermi Paradox
In a recent article, Yıldızoğlu (2021) reminded us of the Fermi Paradox, which can be summarised as: Although the probability of the existence of other forms of life in the universe is sufficiently high, why have we not met any?
Enrico Fermi, the Italian–American physicist and the creator of the world’s first nuclear reactor, was probably not the first person who asked: “but where is everybody?” However, the paradox he formulated led astronomers, astrophysicists, planetary scientists, and others to offer more than a dozen explanations.
One of these explanations is reminiscent of our civilisation: Intelligent life self-destructs. Through weapons of mass destruction, planetary

This article originally appeared in the Indian journal Economic and Political Weekly on 13 March 2021.
What the battle of GameStop has brought into light is that democracy in financial markets is just a myth: whoever controls the valves, controls the flow. The market-making and brokerage markets in the United States are heavily oligopolistic markets in which market-makers and brokers extract huge rents from the retail traders. Although the retail traders involved in the battle appear unaware of what they did, they brought these markets to a near collapse, which the oligopolists managed to stop. Theirs is neither a revolution nor Occupy Wall Street, but a novel form of collective action expected to continue.
To summarise the GameStop debacle, on which there are already at least five