The good old days are always in the past.

Salman A Soz writes that having staked his reputation on demonetization of high value notes, Prime Minister Modi has become a prisoner of 'sunk cost fallacy'. "Individuals become victims of the sunk cost fallacy when they persist with a task to which resources have been committed even after evidence emerges that the task is unlikely to be successfully completed," he writes. Soz has worked with the World Bank and so must know his economics, but he is a spokesman for the Congress and so will probably see everything that Modi does with a jaundiced eye. Most of the cash in circulation is back in banks and it will take many years to extract taxes on dubious deposits. "Worse, evidence emerged of an economic slowdown and job losses in the informal sector. The poor appear to be worst hit," he writes. True. "After casting demonetisation as a 'war' against the 'corrupt' he asked people to make sacrifices in the national interest. The government's methods became increasingly coercive and desperate." 74 notifications issued over 50 days, to frighten and coerce people, was a sign of the government's desperation. Abhinav Rajput and Prawesh Lama set out to see if Modi has delivered on his campaign promise of "achhe din", which means 'good days'. They find that retail inflation has fallen, millions of people have opened bank accounts and many economic reforms have been cleared. On the negative side only 1,35,000 jobs were created in 2015, when we need to create over 10 million jobs every year, and farmers are suffering as prices have crashed because there were no notes to buy their produce, this when farmers were hoping for some decent earnings after 2 years of drought. Ritesh Jain writes how farmers are suffering in Karnataka and Chinese smartphone handsets have captured 46% of the Indian market, from local manufacturers. Milind Murugkar wrote about the silent suffering of farmers in Maharashtra In addition to distress in agriculture demonetisation may sound the death knell for many units in the informal sector which function on cash, resulting in massive job losses. Rohit Prasad employs game theory to suggest that Modi is looking for absolute power, his success will depend on the level of Nash Equilibrium acceptable to the people. Srinath Raghavan insists that demonetization is a form of central planning, which was so thoroughly discredited by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek. Modi is claiming to have purified India from the evils of corrupution, like Xi Jinping is doing in China. However, it is not all bad. Writing for Bloomberg, Narae Kim finds that Modi has more than doubled the number of toilets and improved maternal and child health substantially. Days are never good when you are living through them, they are always the good old days.