#
Mary Oliver is one of my favorite poets and one of my favorite lines by her goes thus,
#
quote, everything that was broken has forgotten its brokenness. Stop quote. I look around
#
and I see much that is breaking and is fresh in our minds but will seem normal tomorrow.
#
And I also see so much that has been wrong for 75 years and we don't even think of it
#
as a problem because it's part of the fabric of our lives. If we are lucky enough to be
#
well off, the world outside our bubble is unseen to us. There is so much shit going
#
on around us that we have normalized. There is no rule of law in this country for most
#
people. Women are second class citizens. Our education system is broken. Health care is
#
broken. The legal system is broken. We still have the wild caste system with us. Three
#
thousand children still die of starvation every day. A quarter of our kids are still
#
malnourished. And at this moment in time, our society is being torn apart by anti-Muslim
#
bigots who are destroying all that is best about India. And even if we sometimes do protest
#
some of this, we get tired. We get back to our lives. The old abnormal becomes a new
#
normal. It is what it is. That is why on this show at least, I try to keep outraging, keep
#
dissenting, maybe against a regime, maybe against a conventional way of thinking, maybe
#
just against bad economics, which is almost written into India's DNA. A couple of times
#
a year, I get economists together and do an episode to take stock of the economy. Our
#
problems are chronic. So it might seem like we keep saying the same things, repackaging
#
the same old laments. But I believe it's important to do so. We cannot take the injustice
#
of this world for granted. And a lot of this injustice has to do with economics. Bad economics
#
kept hundreds of millions of people in India in poverty for decades longer than necessary.
#
Bad economics is responsible for people slipping back into poverty today. Bad economics has
#
humanitarian consequences. And that's why we should never shut up about it.
#
Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
#
science. Please welcome your host, Amit Verma. Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen. My guests
#
today are the economists Rajeshwari Sengupta and Shriyana Bhattacharya, both of whom have
#
been my guests before and have recorded memorable episodes with me. I recorded an episode on
#
the GDP with Rajeshwari, how GDP is flawed in concept and messed up in practice, especially
#
in India. Besides that powerful primer, we also did an episode where she and I and two
#
other guests laid out our dream reforms for India. And Shriyana appeared on an episode
#
from earlier this year called The Loneliness of the Indian Woman, which has since become
#
one of the most popular episodes of the show and has struck a chord with so many people
#
everywhere. If you haven't already heard it, I recommend you listen. So many TIL moments.
#
Now when I heard Shriyana was coming to Bombay, I thought it was a perfect chance to do a
#
state of the economy kind of episode with her and Rajeshwari. Once they both agreed,
#
I realized that we now had the most Bengalis that had ever been inside my home studio.
#
They're both bong, I'm half bong, so that's two and a half bongs, which is appropriate
#
for this episode because I wanted it to be like an adda. No structure, just chill together,
#
humble, talk about this and that, let it flow. We ended up speaking about economics, society,
#
the imposter syndrome, how women manage in a male dominated profession, how inflation
#
affects women in a greater way than men, the problems with academia and Delhi high society
#
and so on. We answered a few questions that had been posed to us on Twitter and at one
#
point we were disturbed by the loud sound of a drill from somewhere, which my brilliant
#
editor Gaurav Chintamani managed to hide completely, but it still rattled us and I had to stop
#
and figure out which flat it was coming from and get them to chill and so on and so forth.
#
You'll hear about that also in the episode. So, well, I mean, enjoy the conversation,
#
but before that, let's take a quick commercial break.
#
Do you want to read more? I've put in a lot of work in recent years in building a reading
#
habit. This means I read more books, but also read more long form articles and essays. There's
#
a world of knowledge available through the internet, but the problem we all face is how
#
do we navigate this knowledge? How do we know what to read? How do we put the right incentives
#
in place for us? Well, I discovered one way. A couple of friends of mine run this awesome
#
company called CTQ Compounds, which aims to help people up level themselves by reading
#
more. A few months ago, I signed up for one of their programs called The Daily Reader.
#
Every day for six months, they sent me a long form article to read. The subjects covered
#
went from machine learning to mythology to mental models to even marmalade. This helped
#
me build a habit of reading. At the end of every day, I understood the world a little
#
better. So if you want to build your reading habit, head on over to CTQ Compounds at ctqcompounds.com
#
slash unseen and check out The Daily Reader. New batches start every month. They also have
#
a great program called Future Stack, which helps you stay up to date with ideas, skills
#
and mental models that will help you stay relevant in the future. Future Stack batches
#
start every Saturday. What's more, you get a discount of a whopping 2500 if you use the
#
discount code unseen. So hey, head on over to CTQ Compounds at ctqcompounds.com slash
#
unseen. Don't forget the slash unseen and use the code unseen. Uplevel yourselves.
#
Shreina and Rajeshwari, welcome to The Scene in the Unseen.
#
Thank you so much, Amit. Good to be here. It's so great to be back, Amit.
#
Yeah, and I got to tell you, Shreina, that your episode really took off. I remember after
#
the recording, you asked me how was it? And I said, it's a classic. And it is now currently
#
the number four most downloaded episode of The Scene in the Unseen.
#
Wow. All of that in Delhi.
#
Yeah. Yeah, that it is. And perhaps after the and it's very close to number three. So
#
it'll probably get there. But the top four are kind of in a class of its own and everything
#
So no pressure at all. Yeah, I will stay silent. You don't need to be spectacular. Yes. No
#
pressure again. Great. So kind of want to start with you, Rajeshwari, because, you know,
#
these days, the episode has evolved into this form where I spend a lot of time talking to
#
people about, you know, their childhood, where they came from the backgrounds, almost like
#
a little oral history, as someone called it. And while you and I have done a couple of
#
episodes before, we haven't done that part of it. And I'm thinking, OK, I know how she
#
thinks, but you don't know me, but I don't know you. And I'd like you to start by telling
#
me about your recent holiday, because just before this recording, you were telling me
#
about this post apocalyptic landscape you went to where you were in the middle of the
#
sea and there was no water, which is so fascinating. So tell me about that.
#
So thanks, Amit. And let me just start by saying, I have no idea why people would be
#
interested at all in my life story. But since I'm here in the chair, I'll get talking.
#
So over the long weekend, we just decided to, and we have been doing a lot of road trips
#
during the lockdown since we couldn't go anywhere else. And this is the first time we started
#
exploring Maharashtra, despite having lived in Bombay for the last seven years. So we
#
decided that we've been almost everywhere that people usually go to. And there's one
#
place that is left that we have been hearing a lot about, and that's Bordi and Dahanu.
#
So we decided to go there, a bunch of three families with all our kids and everything.
#
And little did we realize, of course, that Bordi and Dahanu are closer to the Gujarat
#
border, which means it's incredibly hot. But still, we went. And so one of the main
#
attractions of Bordi is the beach. So we go to the beach the evening of the day when we
#
reach the place, and we find that there's a low tide. Now, what we know of low tide
#
from places like Juhu beach, et cetera, is that the water recedes a little bit, and then
#
after a point, it comes back, right? Whereas on Bordi beach, we discovered that the sea
#
has literally retreated more than 12 to 15 kilometers, if not more. So you can't see
#
the water at all standing on the beach. And what you see is kilometer and kilometer of
#
what looks like mirage, right? Because there's a shimmery, because of the sun, the setting
#
sun, a little bit of shimmering on the surface because it's all watery mud, because the sea
#
has retreated. And it's all slush and black earth kind of thing. And you can keep walking
#
for about 10, 12 kilometers on the seabed, yet not reach the sea. And there was nobody
#
else around, it was just us. So exactly as I said, it really felt apocalyptic because
#
in the sense that you feel that it's the end of the world and the sea has retreated somewhere
#
far away and you can't reach it. And at least for me, I felt this irresistible pull that
#
I have to keep walking towards the sea to find how far the water is. So we kept walking
#
and after a point of time, I think we walked quite a bit. And it was just us in the middle
#
of this vast seabed with no water anywhere. And the actual beach is far away, the water
#
is somewhere else. And we were in the middle of nowhere, literally. So it was a surreal
#
feeling. And that ended up being my definition of having fun in Bordi. But it was fascinating.
#
I have not seen something like this ever before. And then we went back the next day to see,
#
the sea has to come back at some point of time. And it did. The high tide was spectacular
#
as well. So that was my long weekend, basically.
#
No, and it's damn scary because what one hears of the tsunami since the tsunami struck
#
in 2003 is that the sea recedes a lot and then it comes back. So if I saw the sea had
#
gone this far back, I would be too scared. I'd probably go further inland rather than
#
In fact, we had to take a call when the sun was setting and we knew that the time of the
#
high tide was approaching and we had gone really far into the seabed that we had to
#
start walking back. And it's pitch dark. Once it gets pitch dark, there's nothing whatsoever.
#
So we had to take a call. Do we keep going towards in search of the water or do we just
#
walk back? So we all decided to walk back. Although for a split second, I was in two
#
So have any of you guys seen Krzysztof Kieslowski's films?
#
I call it the first great web series in a sense. He made a series of 10 films for Polish television
#
in 91 or 90 or something like that called Decalogue, with each film being on one of
#
the 10 commandments. And the first of those was called, Thou shalt have no other God than
#
me. It was based on that commandment. And obviously I don't even think he's necessarily
#
a believer, but it was just interesting reinterpretations. And it's about a guy whose son wants to go
#
skating in a lake that has just gotten frozen up and he's complete scientific temperament
#
and he does the math and everything. So he figures out exactly that it is not safe today,
#
it is not safe tomorrow, it is safe on Wednesday because that's where the temperature will
#
be and you can go skating and nothing will happen and all of that. And not to give, I
#
mean the spoiler doesn't matter because it's just such a great film and I watch it again
#
and again. His son goes out and drowns, the ice breaks. And then the last shot of that
#
little short film is that while he's at the edge of the water and he's thinking about
#
his son, in the distance he sees as a homeless tramp who's lit a fire by the side of the
#
You know? So if you get the connection with Thou shalt have no other God but me, just
#
tremendous. And when you were speaking of doing calculations of what time the high tide
#
will come and I was like, you fool, come back.
#
Yeah. So my daughter, she's four years old and she was obviously scared because I mean,
#
it was surreal to me for her, she had never seen something like that. So she decided to
#
stay back on the beach and my husband was torn in between, should I go with the wife,
#
should I go with the daughter? So I think he also went more towards the beach. But then
#
for me it was just, I mean, you just felt, I just felt like you keep walking and whatever
#
happens happens. I mean, at some point you just hit the sea, nothing more happens. But
#
it's just that the time, it's just so far away, you keep walking and then it can get
#
dark, the high tide can come, you may not have enough time to walk back, all of those
#
things. So it was spooky, but it was fascinating.
#
Fabulous. And people say economists are boring people. What rubbish. What do you mean they
#
Who are these people who say economists are boring people?
#
I'm definitely not one of them.
#
What's the most adventurous thing you've done, Sreeyana? Have you been reckless?
#
No, I have never been reckless. I think I've just written my recklessness away and now I'm
#
leading the life of a very boring urban hermit in Delhi. I actually, you know, actually listening
#
to you, I'm realizing I haven't done any travel recently. I've just been broadly in Delhi
#
and now with the book, a little bit of travel has now started to happen, which is exciting.
#
But I'm really looking forward to a holiday, which would be nice. But going back to this
#
thing about economists being boring, I mean, have you seen the current conversations between
#
all of us? It's like we're saying the same thing to each other constantly and it's getting
#
quite repetitive and boring. So it's nice that you're discussing holidays now because
#
I do think that there is just general fatigue in the discourse.
#
I think that given that we are living in India, it's always very adventurous and exciting
#
to be an economist in India because there is always something or the other that's happening.
#
I mean, being an economist in the US is damn boring because nothing much happens there.
#
Being an economist in India, one day you have a demonetization, one day you have a lockdown
#
that is announced with a four hours notice to the utmost misery of most people. And then
#
one day you have like a GST, which is implemented with the shortest possible manner. There's
#
always something or the other happening. And I just feel that it's difficult to almost
#
keep pace with how things are changing. And it's like last year we were thinking of the
#
pandemic and the pandemic is receding and the economy is going to come out of it. And
#
then bang, you get hit by a geopolitical Russia-Ukraine war. Then bang, you have US inflation higher
#
than in the last 40 years. There's constantly something or the other happening. So I don't
#
get bored with the discourse. I think primarily because in India there is just so many shocks
#
and so many policies gone wrong.
#
I think that's the source of my boredom, which is that I think we keep saying things and
#
then things just go wrong. And I feel like now we're just stuck in this cycle of just
#
anticipating the next thing that will potentially happen. And then a bunch of us will write
#
things and a bunch of us will say a lot. And then we have a set of institutions and you're
#
giggling now, I can see you, you know, who will ignore everything that useful that has
#
to be said. So you know what I mean. My boredom is not with the state of the fact that we
#
have analysis to do, although there's no data and I know we'll come to that. I hope we'll
#
come to that. I really do want to come to that. But even if there were data and we're
#
using data, I think where my sense of the cyclical fatigue has come in is just the fact
#
that we say stuff and then we all get very excited about it. But I just, yeah, it's
#
a, it's this, it's quite, I have to say, it's actually quite dispiriting. I mean,
#
at this stage, I sort of, I feel that way. I'm curious, what do you think?
#
Yeah, I don't feel dispirited. At the same time, I wouldn't say that I feel extremely
#
optimistic either. Right. But I find a lot of, I take a lot of confidence from the fact
#
that economists still have a lot of energy to keep doing what we are doing, despite the
#
fact that yes, many things have happened and whatever we are saying, whatever we are prescribing
#
are not being implemented. But at the same time, if you take a very long arc of modern
#
history, like even for India, 30-40 years, no, even for 30-40 years in India, right?
#
I mean, where we were 40 years back and where we are today, definitely there has been a
#
significant amount of change and improvement. And the way economists have analyzed things,
#
the way we have come up with policy prescriptions, some of which has helped, some of which has
#
itself changed. So I don't think, yes, if you take an immediate short term view that,
#
okay, but crisis keeps happening and we keep saying this is a mistake and that is a mistake
#
and nobody's listening to us. Right. Yeah. But at the same time, if you look at, again,
#
as I say, 30-40 years, people have listened and things have changed. I don't know whether
#
we have another 30-40 years looking at the state of the economy is right now, where we
#
don't know. There's a lot of debate about what's happening to precarity in the job market.
#
Although I wonder about that, but I really wonder. I mean, I think we need some very
#
serious investments and decisions right now, in fact, given what's coming out of.
#
The reason why the despondency becomes bigger now is in the current dispensation, at least,
#
there has been an effort to keep, I mean, if I may call them experts or whatever you
#
want to call them, right? There has been a conscious effort to keep them at bay, to keep
#
them away and to not involve them in any kind of decision making, any kind of policy analysis.
#
We have seen an exodus of people from India. We have seen all the other economists have
#
just withdrawn in their own echo chambers, and we are just talking to each other because
#
nobody is interested to talk to us. And that is something that I think the authorities
#
and the policymakers have done, and they have taken this decision that we don't want to
#
engage with them anymore. But I also think that this is a wave. I mean, again, I have
#
a very long-term view of things that I think it is a wave. And over a period of time, when
#
they do realize that things are getting really, really bad and it's already happening, at
#
some point, you have to start engaging with the experts. You have to start engaging with
#
the economists and understand what exactly, what are the ideas they are talking about.
#
I mean, 1991 reforms happened. And imagine the way they happened. Till 1991, nobody was
#
really paying attention to that side of economics, so to speak. And then, boom, it happened.
#
And they had every incentive to roll back the reforms once the crisis was averted, and
#
they did not. They stuck to the reforms and they sustained the energy and the momentum
#
of the reforms. And I think economists played a fairly important role then. And since then,
#
I think from 2010 onwards, particularly, there has been a sort of slow withdrawal from expertise,
#
from specialization, from any kind of intellectual discourse. And I'm hoping at least that that's
#
another wave and soon they will have to realize that this is not working out.
#
I mean, if I look at just what's happening now, my sense almost is that there's almost
#
a lot of regurgitating of the common sense, analytics and ideas and tropes of economics,
#
even amongst actually our politics or policymakers, but the impetus to take decisions. I mean,
#
I think the 1990s, in fact, that reform stories, you know, Amit's done so many shows on this.
#
It's a very powerful example of, well, we knew the ideas, but then it took sort of a
#
whole set. It's an apparatus that has to act and then has to implement and roll out and
#
check whether the rollout is working in a certain direction. I'm not sure. I think looking
#
at the current state of affairs, where that apparatus right now lies. So I don't think
#
and to me, remember, I mean, it's not just about economics in academic economics. I'm
#
thinking of the Indian Economic Service. I'm thinking of economists within the apparatus
#
who are supposed to form this crux of a core constituency that will fight for reform within.
#
And I think that's where I see a lot more despondency, just informally what one sees
#
when one is interacting with government agencies and just the general discourse. And so what
#
worries me sometimes is I almost feel that there's now currently like an incentive to
#
live in even deeper bubbles, more energetic and energized bubbles, because it's wonderful
#
then to be in that bubble and find like minded people who you can talk to. But I think beyond
#
those individual, I wouldn't even call them echo chambers, because I think that's doing
#
a disservice. I think they are bubbles of thoughts and very important thoughts. But
#
I just don't know beyond that. I mean, you remember there was that fabulous book that
#
came out, I'm going to say before the pandemic, it had essays by people like Pranjal Bhandari
#
and Raghuram Rajan and Abhijit on sort of all kinds of things that you could do with
#
the economy, really useful suggestions and very concrete, actually, it was a very refreshing
#
book because they really made it. I actually now almost wondered, you know, if you just
#
go back to those texts and just see, well, how much of what was low hanging fruit has
#
happened or not happened. I think we'll find very dismal results. And I don't think the
#
reason is academic economists are not energized and enthusiastic. I think there's a whole
#
community that's doing economics and the job of economic policymaking and decision making,
#
which lies within government, lies within local think tanks, support groups, lobbies.
#
I think it's a very complex set of actors. And there I almost sense that there's a lot
#
of parroting of the words and the tropes. But the conviction perhaps, maybe conviction
#
is a very strong word, but the zeal to sort of say, we need to do this. I don't know where
#
that's evaporating. It's very sad. There is also the element that, at least again,
#
in the last few years, the way things have evolved is that if you, let's say, believe
#
in something, an economic policy or an economic recommendation, it need not just on the merit
#
of the economic argument, it may not be accepted as long as it doesn't echo with the sort
#
of what I call the quote unquote party line, right? I mean, unless you are really talking
#
in terms of what they want to hear, unless you are really saying you're sort of playing
#
to the gallery, even if there is an economic merit to the argument, they don't want to
#
hear it. And they're going to choose the arguments of the people who are talking about stuff
#
that they want to hear. Be that as it may, I think at the same time, it is very important
#
to keep talking about the ideas and keep discussing and debating everything that we are doing.
#
Because as I said, at some point of time, the need to pay attention to this will also
#
be felt. I'm saying that it is easy to feel despondent because we are not heard or people
#
don't hear us, our voice is not being heard about. But then at the same time, I think
#
a time will come that they will realize that this is not working and we have to do some
#
course correction. And so what are the ideas lying out there on the table and how much
#
of that can be adopted? So I think, I mean, for the sake of that future optimism, we just
#
have to keep discussing and debating and not give up. Because if we give up, that's almost
#
like what they want us to do. And, you know, that that should not happen. I'm just going
#
to say I agree with both of you. And I'm, you know, Shreya and I find your pessimism
#
refreshing because when we spoke in Delhi, it's like there are two different people,
#
right? Shreya comes to Delhi, she's someone else. She comes to Bombay. Bombay is very
#
Bombay vibe is very different. I wonder what's going on, you know, Bombay me kya hai aisa.
#
But the bandstand, Bombay me bandstand hai, Mannat hai. But that should make her more
#
optimistic though. We'll come to that. We'll come to that. Because in Delhi, she was so
#
optimistic that even I was saying optimistic things accidentally, you know, just out of
#
politeness. But I am, of course, deeply pessimistic. So I agree with you that at one level it can
#
get disheartening that the rhetoric is all the same. And you mentioned that book in which
#
all those people had those essays. The point is, those ideas were great. They were concrete
#
as you point out. None of them were new. Yes. We've been saying that for 20-30 years. Exactly.
#
You had, even people like Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagar, you're saying the same
#
things. Yes. And then when they get proximity to power, just completely ignoring everything
#
they said and everything they believed in to go in a completely different direction.
#
But that is a separate rant. At the same time, Rajeshwari, I agree with you that, you know,
#
our words may be pointless. If I may say our, it kind of grandiose. But our words may be
#
pointless. But it is in a sense our dharma to keep saying them. Because you never really
#
know. Like one sort of interesting point Ajay Shah made with me when he was on the show
#
is that he said that, look, the 91 reforms took that moment of crisis to happen. Yes.
#
But what is important is that there was an infrastructure of people who believed in those
#
ideas, who discussed those ideas through the mid to late 80s, which were the economists
#
in government and all of that. And he said that's not there anymore. Exactly. So in fact,
#
if I may add one point here is that we are thinking of our usefulness from a policy perspective.
#
I think that's taking a bit of a narrow view of what economists in any field can do. Fine.
#
Maybe we are no longer a part of the Delhi North Block and South Block and whatever RBI,
#
where we used to be called at one point of time for policy discussions. But there is
#
also a larger role that we have in terms of influencing minds and informing people, creating
#
knowledge and diffusing knowledge. So the way I look at it is, let's say you're creating
#
knowledge, you're diffusing knowledge and you're trying to fix the world in whichever
#
small teeny weeny bit you want to do it. Maybe the last part of it is a little bit broken
#
because you don't have access to the real world policymaking process, but you still
#
have the responsibility of creating and diffusing knowledge and diffusing ideas and then shaping
#
people's opinions, forming opinions. For example, what I do a lot with my students now that
#
I'm not obviously getting engaged in the policymaking process, I engage a lot with my students
#
because these are 21, 22 year olds and they are curious, they're hungry for knowledge
#
and this is my opportunity to teach them something interesting, to form their opinions, to help
#
them debate, to provoke their thoughts. They are the future because they are going to,
#
after 10 years or so, they're going to turn around and say, what this government is doing
#
is not right or this is right. To help them reach that opinion, to help them reach that
#
kind of a knowledge is also a very big contribution that I think economies can do. And I think
#
we should keep doing that because we will need to form that opinion. We will need to
#
bring up that critical mass of people who believe in a certain thing. And I think that's
#
very important, particularly now when there has been an erosion of intellectualism, if
#
No, in fact, I agree with you and I just say that that's why I do the show. That's why
#
I do the show. That's why we write whatever we write, because the whole point is not because
#
I'm very pessimistic. I don't think there is an outcome to this that I might even see
#
in my own lifetime. But the point is you do the right thing because it is the right thing
#
You don't do it with an outcome. So I can be pessimistic and still put as much of myself
#
into the work because I think of it as playing a long game, except it's a, you know, maybe
#
some 15 year old girl listening to the show today can be prime minister in 2030.
#
Exactly. I mean you're creating a community and that community may play a very important
#
role at a time when you may not even be around and that's the contribution.
#
This specific contribution that you have mentioned is really a public intellectual facet to being
#
an economist. Now, you know, we took a bunch of questions on Twitter and a couple of them
#
and we'll come back to your personal story later. We'll keep digressing in and out. Think
#
of it as a funky Bollywood structure.
#
So we go in and out of different narratives.
#
Or think of it as an ada of two and a half Bengalis.
#
Ada of two and a half Bengalis is a great way to put it.
#
I think my half also. Is you the half? You're the half.
#
I think you should be more like two.
#
Yeah, I don't think I, I mean, I've just, Robin brought up too much in Punjab, but this
#
This is for later. So a couple of the questions actually hit directly at this question. Like,
#
you know, Shrena, before you came over lunch, Rajeshwari and I were chatting about how economists
#
often suffer from the curse of knowledge that they'll know something so well that they'll
#
assume that, Oh, everybody knows this. We don't need to say it. And I realized sometimes
#
it's not the case. Most people really want to know. They're curious about what do economists
#
do. And a couple of the questions that came in indicate that where Monami at Monami DG
#
on Twitter asks, how has their research contributed to or influenced real change in the society?
#
Right? That's one thing. And another question from Murugesh is in which area the theory
#
of economics has the highest accuracy or probability of success? That's another thing. And there
#
are different questions, you know, a couple of the lovely sort of skeptical notes that
#
were struck. One is by Varun Das, where he paraphrased George Bernard Shaw. And he said,
#
lay them end to end and see if they reach a conclusion. And another one, you know, Harry
#
Truman had this famous saying, I want a one handed economist, because economists keep
#
saying on one hand this on the other hand that and a Twitter user called up to a point
#
asked the question, would an octopus make for a good economist because it can say on
#
the other hand, seven times. But my entirely serious question, therefore, a lay person
#
is what do economists do? Right? Now, one of the laments of our friend has been that
#
too many economists who have studied the subject and know the subject, then enter this long
#
academic circle jerk where they take themselves out of the system and they have no impact
#
at all on the real world. And it is his lament that too many bright people do this and more
#
people should stay back like him, who actually try to make who actually do things in the
#
real world. Now, where do you find economists? You know, like in Delhi, I understand there
#
might be places you can throw a stone and hit one. But not that economy should be stoned.
#
Yes, no, but they might be. They might be stoned for different reasons. Very, very soon
#
in multiple ways. But so tell me, what is the ecosystem for economists? Like, where
#
are economists? What are they doing? Do they make a difference in the real world?
#
So if I may go first. Go ahead. Which is so there was a time, Amit, when and I'm talking
#
of let's say in pre 90s, right? When you think of economists or statisticians, they were all
#
in academia, right? You would have this universities and they would be professors, faculty members,
#
teaching students and doing research. This was the old traditional world of economists.
#
From there, we we went through liberalization, privatization, globalization, etc. And then
#
I think the whole ecosystem of economists where they can go broadened significantly.
#
And it's no longer just limited to academic economists going to university, teaching students
#
and writing research papers that nobody can understand. A lot of that happens as well.
#
At the same time, for example, you have think tanks. And this started with the Planning
#
Commission being the oldest think tank, so to speak, Planning Commission. And from there
#
on, you think of all the think tanks in Delhi, Bangalore, Bombay, Pune. It's all over the
#
place in India and globally as well, where these are the economists have chosen not to
#
enter universities. You're not essentially teaching students per se, but you're doing
#
a lot of government work. You're doing a lot of policy work, which is also very valuable.
#
Also, then there are a lot of economists who are in demand in the corporate world. So all
#
of these big corporate banks, corporate organizations would have chief economist and other economist
#
positions where they need this economist to talk to the foreign clientele, foreign investors,
#
domestic investors as well. And that's a good service because you are sort of convincing
#
the investors to bring money into India. You're convincing the domestic investors to invest
#
in a certain financial portfolio, and you're sort of helping them understand what the state
#
of the economy like. And that's also, I think, a very important thing that they're doing.
#
And also, for example, you would have economists in India particularly, where there is this
#
mix of you are an academic economist who are in a university, you're teaching students,
#
et cetera, but you're also involved in media writing, where you want to make economics
#
more accessible to the common man. And you're writing in media on a regular basis because
#
you feel strongly about these things. You think that you need to have a voice and the
#
common man, and these are newspapers or media outlets that are being accessed by educated
#
people, let's call it that way. And therefore, you are no longer keeping economics restricted
#
to only those who understand the jargon, the math, the numbers. You're trying to make it
#
accessible, which I think is extremely important. And these are also the economists who could
#
occasionally engage with think tanks, occasionally engaging with the consulting world, with the
#
corporate world. And then sort of the boundaries get blurred, which I find is a fascinating
#
development that has happened in this post-liberalization world, which was non-existent earlier. So
#
that economists operating in silos or economics sitting in ivory tars and completely inaccessible
#
to the common man, I think that has definitely changed significantly. And it's something
#
to be quite hopeful about. For example, I look at my coterie of economies that I hang
#
out with, so to speak. Almost nobody is an academic economist in university. Everybody,
#
either they are entrepreneurs who have started their own think tank, or they are in a corporate
#
world who are talking to the investors and writing regularly in columns. They are writing
#
chapters in books. They are talking to multilateral organizations. It's all over the place. So
#
the contribution is no longer that one centric, that either you're teaching students and sitting
#
in ivory tars, or you're sitting in a planning commission. It's a much more broad based contribution.
#
And that's why I think that we shouldn't only think of our usefulness from a policy
#
making perspective. Even if that one thing has gotten suppressed for the time being,
#
there are many, many other things where you could be contributing. And I guess that's
#
what to answer your question, that's what economists do.
#
Maybe I can come in. You know, in fact, this relates to what I was also talking about the
#
general sense of despondency. First, let's start with who is an economist, right? Like,
#
let's just start with that. I completely disagree. I don't have a PhD in economics. I have a
#
job. It's very much a job of a jobbing economist. I work with people at the World Bank. Many
#
of them come from very strong, almost jobbing every day dealing with the economy and real
#
terms in very different ways. Some work on infrastructure, some may work on tariff pricing,
#
some work like myself on the welfare state. So let's start with that. I think the biggest
#
issue I take with, I think, the economist community is, well, I agree with Rajeshwari
#
that there's a blurring, but I think there's a blurring as long as you have the same sort
#
of status and credentials as each other. You can speak to each other. You can almost scan
#
your CVs and you have a sense of what that means. There are lots of economists and young
#
students who studied economics. I go to Bhubaneshwar. I go to like small towns in Chhattisgarh.
#
There are kids who have studied a master's who are interested. Some of them have joined
#
junior government services, right? So they are state carder officers. There are lots
#
of people who are very elegant in the way they think about using economic theory, data.
#
They have a great facility for it. They may not have PhDs from the fanciest places or
#
they may not be, in fact, interacting with a world of status, be it think tanks, corporates,
#
so on and so forth, but they are actively using that body of knowledge in their everyday
#
decision making. I work with some of these young men. Often they are men. That is still
#
the nature of, I think that's the other thing. One is who is an economist? An economist is
#
often a man. So it's really lovely that actually we're both here. So thanks Amit for that.
#
And I think the first issue we do have to sort of start to think about, and I think
#
Amit, you and I talked about it during our last episode, which is how do you start to
#
create a community of thinking and practice around the economy that may not necessarily
#
be involved in academic production or production of research material for policymaking or for
#
essentially communicating to a future generation of students, because I think that's a very
#
different world. We also talked about last time, Amit, that the point is not to impact
#
policy. The point is to change the way people think. And I think economic theory actually,
#
perhaps sometimes even more than data, has a very strong way of helping you make sense
#
of the world. And I see that. So I think the first thing I want to say is when you ask
#
what do economists do, I think the first thing we need to ask is who is an economist? And
#
to me, an economist is not someone who just has a PhD from a certain set of schools who
#
studied it. People who have that obviously play in a different league, and I think that's
#
a different world, but there's a whole community out there who I don't think are as vociferous
#
and I wish they were, and I'm looking to that. And what makes me despondent, honestly, is
#
when you asked what do economists do, so there's the world that Rajeshwari just described,
#
which is actually, I do agree, is thriving. There's a lot of investment. This is being
#
supported. You start to move away. And in fact, there are think tanks which used to
#
be really well supported, now are struggling with FCRA, raising domestic funding, raising
#
foreign funding for research. And I think there's a deep crisis of that. And when I'm
#
talking about these young men, they are, again, I hope there'll be more young women in say,
#
a small town or tier two town in a state in India, which is not Maharashtra or Delhi.
#
I think part of the issue is where will the financing, a sustainable model of financing
#
come from, where a lot of these young men and women can be exposed to economic models
#
of thinking, which I think are really powerful, and then use them in their day-to-day lives,
#
almost as if you're solving puzzles, which is actually sometimes what I think is very
#
elegant about the subject. I don't think we're doing that enough. I think what economists
#
tend to do is, Rajeshwari, I think has just summarized that really beautifully, just from
#
my own example, day-to-day, what is my job? My job is, in fact, using a lot of that theory
#
to think about how different states in India design their welfare policies. How is the
#
welfare state functioning? In fact, I think one of the core areas where I think economists
#
and economists who don't necessarily, again, subscribe to a certain way we define economists
#
have really impacted the real world is welfare. I think Rajeshwari alluded to this, so many
#
NGOs, so many activists, actually, they come from the world of partial economics training,
#
and I can see how they've used those ideas, a kind of affinity to evidence-based decision
#
making in their activism, which has been really powerful. And I think we owe a lot to that.
#
And I think what we need to think very carefully about as a community is, how is it that we
#
can raise support and create a parallel ecosystem which actually supports this kind of knowledge
#
generation, access to data, and it doesn't ring-fence it around just certain norms around
#
what is considered sort of, you know, who is an economist by status, but who is an economist
#
by interest and by activity. And then, you know, you may really be terrible at the subject,
#
like, I could never finish a PhD. It's just not, I don't have the talent or the tenacity
#
for it. As I mentioned earlier, I have different kinds of talents, and that actually is a world
#
I'm very optimistic about. I think for me, maybe that is where moving away what I will
#
do in the future, I think that is where I'm interested. But if you start to look at what's
#
happening to that world now, it's institutionally heavily constrained in terms of where it will
#
find sources of just straight-up market financing to support it. You have, you know, I can tell
#
you there are IES officers or state carder officers working in different states in the
#
country who want to be better trained. They want to study more. They want to learn more.
#
But the Indian labasana and all the sort of, you know, the institutions that teach theory
#
or practice to these, you know, to officers, they are limited in also what they are able
#
to do and who they will include in their training programs. The capacity, and I think you had
#
guests here who've talked about this before, the capacity of administrative structures
#
to offer this kind of training is also limited. Star economists do not go to, you know, small
#
state carder training academies to sort of train. I think that's starting to change.
#
I'm very excited by some of the things I hear J-PAL is trying to do with their partnerships.
#
I think that's really the space where I think economists, there's a lot of demand for economists
#
to do stuff. And I think there could be buoyancy, but right now it's heavily constrained. And
#
I think to answer your question, in addition to I think what Rajeshree said and the question
#
the gentleman asked about what do economists do, I also think economists do participate.
#
We can't walk away from the circle jerk. That is a significant chunk of what I think a lot
#
of economists are doing. And I face it and, you know, I've seen it is interesting even
#
with the book of the life of the book, I've noticed what that actually means. And I think
#
being a bit more empathetic to the fact that there are, there's a community out there that
#
may not be participating in the circle, but is very interested and is also in positions
#
of authority and power. And also in their day to day life can use this as theory data
#
and make impactful, meaningful decisions. I think that's really critical to me. So yeah.
#
One thing, if I may add, Amit, it may not have come across clearly, but one thing that
#
I was trying to allude to is that there was a time when economics was considered an inaccessible
#
subject because it is traditionally very math heavy. It was more science than social science.
#
It was very heavy in statistics. It was considered that only a handful of people who have a certain
#
knowledge or bent of mind and access to a certain kind of training can end up studying
#
economics. And that limited the scope for economics. And that also I think gave economics
#
a bad name down the road because there's this notion that if you're an economist, it's a
#
very hard subject. It's a very dry thing. We are dealing with things that we don't even
#
understand. At the same time, economics fundamentally at heart is a social science. It derives inspiration
#
from what's happening in the society. And therefore, I think somewhere down the line,
#
we lost that connection that economists need to be able to explain what's happening in
#
the society and also communicate that to the society. So we went into this whole world
#
of almost a very scientific theorizing world where you're very good in your theoretical
#
models and you're doing a whole lot of cranking of equations and math. But ultimately, what
#
does it all mean in terms of intuition, in terms of the real life social impact? And
#
very, very few economists would then make the effort of bridging that gap. And I think primarily
#
in the US, for example, where most of the economic theories come from, a lot of it was
#
because economists there is all university economist with PhD, as Shaina mentioned, publishing
#
in journals. So that's a whole different ball game altogether. But what I realized is, and
#
I think I've mentioned in the first episode with you, is that when I came back to India,
#
I realized the world is very, very different and much better, quote unquote, compared to
#
what I saw in the US. Because here there are economists who make the effort to reach out
#
to the common man or beat. And this has nothing to do with whether you have a PhD in economics,
#
whether you don't have a PhD in economics. You have some basic training in economics.
#
You understand the world and you want to explain the world to the rest of the society. And
#
there are people who have made that effort. You're writing in the media. You're doing
#
even to the extent that everybody listens to TV, even in regional languages. You're
#
doing TV interviews. You're trying to explain what the budget means. You're trying to explain
#
what's happening to inflation, what's happening to prices. And that is very, very important.
#
And I think that's a very valuable service that economists, and by economists, I mean
#
anybody who has a basic training in economics to be able to understand things a little bit
#
better than, let's say, for example, what the common man on the street would. But they
#
are taking that effort to explain that. And that is a world that I think has happened
#
over the last 20, 30 years. And of course, there's a whole long way to go. We are just
#
only scratching the surface. But to the extent that it is happening, to the extent that people,
#
as a critical mass of economists, who are at least aware of this responsibility and
#
they're doing it, doing that, I think that that's definitely a great thing. And in terms
#
of funding, I think this is a constraint across all subjects, like even hard sciences, which
#
traditionally would get more funding. Everybody's struggling to get funding over the last few
#
years because there is this whole constraint on intellectual pursuit or constraint on scientific
#
pursuit in terms of giving funding to universities and institutions.
#
I just want to, just on one thing, I don't, in fact, I think that there has been a particular
#
squeeze put in. And maybe, Amit, also, I think part of my pessimism is coming from, I've
#
just come back from Delhi and I've seen some very dear friends who are trying to just hold
#
on to their organizations with dear life. It's very hard right now, especially if you're
#
going to produce independent social science research, which invariably will speak to livelihoods.
#
I see this across the board. In fact, some of the most useful economic data is coming
#
out of NGOs that, you know, you take Ajeevika Bureau looking at migrants, you look at a
#
lot of the work that's coming out of different organizations who are not even based in Delhi
#
or Bombay. They're not interested in that game. They are all being squeezed. It's a
#
very difficult time. And I think while, yeah, sure, it's difficult for universities and
#
institutions, but universities and institutions will always fight. There'll be corporates,
#
there'll be patrons, there'll be alumni. When I look at these organizations, which
#
are almost trying to create their own models of economic investigation. Actually, a lot
#
of theory is ground up theory, right? It can come from here. I think they can come up with
#
a very different way of thinking about how we theorize migration movements and labor
#
leisure trade-offs, for example. But who will finance that work? Because what I see, and
#
you know, maybe this comes from the fact that my first job ever was at a heavily underfunded
#
feminist think tank, where I saw my boss constantly struggling, this remarkable woman constantly
#
struggling to just organize funds. And invariably, if you link yourself to donor financing, which
#
is invariably what happens with think tanks, livelihoods, organizations, donors are interested
#
and I don't blame them. I understand they're interested in certain outcomes, right? Which
#
always have to do with, give me a survey, give me some data points. But maybe there's
#
a theory that can be built off that there are lessons to be crystallized. And I just
#
don't see right now and I see organizations really struggling to find core institutional
#
funding to be able to do that. And I think in that world, you will still have the dominant
#
modes of knowledge production, particularly in the social sciences and economics is particularly
#
politically very important because it is the economy, right? I mean, it kind of holds a
#
set of interactions, which hold tremendous power. And I think I see that. So I share,
#
I think what Rajeshwari says that, well, things have changed in that, you know, it's a much
#
more democratic space. Sure. I think there's a lot more than we can do. I often joke now
#
that I don't want to Brahmin, explain the economy to anyone. I actually now just want
#
to hear where different theories come from. And I think there are things happening in
#
universities we may not even know about, right? Or organizations we may not know of. But what
#
often I wonder about is where will that almost the venture capital for that come from? And
#
in fact, this is where I think that the Indian private sector can come into play a really
#
important role because we know these organizations are going to struggle to find foreign financing.
#
So yeah, I think we have to think about just these very alternative models of supporting
#
these ecosystems. And that I think I'm very excited about because I do think that there
#
is a quorum of now young people, particularly in the private sector, who I think are thinking
#
about some of these things, especially given where we are right now as a country.
#
So I'll tell you the peculiar thing that happens with the funding constraint. And this I again
#
learned after coming back here is that there are certain fields which are fundable. And
#
then certain fields will not attract funding no matter what you do. And unfortunately,
#
because I do macroeconomics, it is one of the unfundable fields, right? Nobody is interested.
#
Nobody is interested in understanding GDP growth rate, but nobody's interested in funding
#
any effort to actually understand the data collection process, right? Everybody's interested
#
in inflation because it affects the common man, but nobody, none of the donors is interested
#
in anything to do with funding monetary policy research. Everybody's interested in government
#
debt taxation. Nobody's interested in funding research to do with the fiscal policies of
#
So I unfortunately work in a field where there is no scope to get funding from anybody, right?
#
Be it the big global multilateral organizations, be it the private sector, be it anybody, right?
#
And I woke up to this reality and I realized that while I am at an institute where there
#
is some funding coming from XYZ, but there is also a push to become more independent
#
in terms of funding. So let's say, for example, if I want to start my own center in macroeconomics
#
research, I will never be able to get funding from anybody despite the fact that I want
#
to start the center in the university. And the university itself doesn't want to do the
#
funding. That's the whole idea of starting an autonomous center, but I won't get funding.
#
But then what do I have to do? If I want to get funding, I'll have to change my areas
#
of interest. I have to change my specializations. For example, if I start working on climate
#
change, if I start working even on any topic related to development economics, if I start
#
working on renewable energy, right? These are the fundable fields where at least there
#
is some scope of getting funding, consumer protection in finance. These are the silos
#
where you can at least get some funding. So then you start to think that, okay, if I want
#
to stay true to what I understand, what I have a limited training and I'm passionate
#
about that, then how do I get my own independent funding if I want to hire five RAs who are
#
equally interested in these subjects and I want to pay their salaries? Where will I get
#
the money from? But then does that mean I have to now start researching in climate change,
#
renewables, health, wherever the donors and the funders think that they are going to get
#
high returns from, right? So that becomes the distortion in social sciences like economics
#
where either you change your field to suit the donor and the funder, or you languish
#
in this low level equilibrium where your salary is just being given by the university, but
#
that may not be enough because a lot of constraints imposed on you by the institute and you may
#
not be having the independence to start a center of your own where you can hire RAs etc.
#
So it's a very, very difficult world to negotiate. There is no doubt about that.
#
So a few strands I want to pick up on and I'll come back to funding, but first we'll
#
kind of circle around the globe and sort of do that. And one is one of my constant rants
#
on the show is this impression people have that economics has nothing to do with the
#
real world. They don't know who cares about these numbers and what is GDP anyway and this
#
and that. And by the way, there were many questions on the GDP for us on Twitter and
#
I just want to tell all of them that, listen, you have an episode length answer on that
#
because Rajeshwari and I did a long episode on GDP which goes into all of these issues.
#
Why is women's unpaid labor not counted and so many conceptual problems with the GDP,
#
practical problems with the GDP and so on and so forth. But my point always has been
#
that numbers are people too. That, you know, economics matters because it shines a lens
#
on real things going wrong in the real world to real people. A good economist will always
#
make that distinction clear. Like one of the reasons I loved your book Shreina so much
#
was that that's exactly what you did, right? You used the tools of economics, the frames
#
of economics of thinking about problems to get to, in a sense, the core of the human
#
condition that this is what people are like. This is why a man and a woman in the same
#
house can't speak, which is a great human tragedy. But this is why it is. And you're
#
using those tools to illuminate that, you know. And to me, that's the best of economics
#
in the sense that it's okay. I see this entire class of economists who go to college, get
#
their PhDs, get all of that. They'll be hyper specialized in sea trade between Peru and
#
Bolivia between 1830 to 1844. Right? I know who you're talking about. No, I'm not actually
#
talking about anyone in particular. I never, I never, I don't, I don't. It is my job to
#
introduce the gossip into the, we'll come to that. We'll come to that. But on the other
#
hand, the thing about economics and why I am so much in love with it. And of course
#
I don't have a PhD in it either. But one reason I love economics is I feel economics fundamentally
#
is a study of human behavior. Right? So if you're interested in human behavior, the economic
#
lens can just teach you so much. Like earlier, Rajeshwari, you and I were at lunch and I
#
asked our companion to ask me any question about anything and I'll give an answer using
#
economics and it's a one word answer. And you know, and you can because the economic
#
way of thinking just illuminates the whole world. Now, taking that forward, when I think
#
of, you know, the person who asked the question that what have you actually achieved? Now
#
there are three ways of defining achieved. Right? One is a top down thing where a government
#
does something. Are you influencing policy at this point in time for the last few years?
#
I don't think any serious economist has influenced policy in any way. Obviously it's just a quacks
#
and crackpots and useful idiots. Yeah. And that's one way. But the point is, if you
#
really want to bring about change, I've always said, don't look at the supply end of the
#
political marketplace. Look at the demand end. Get your ideas out there among the people.
#
You know, in clear language, use those tools of economics, share those tools of economics
#
so others can also apply them to their own lives and the world around you. And there,
#
I think within civil society, there are two ways this can happen. One is civil society
#
organizations which do their own work and their own research. Like, you know, Shrana,
#
you pointed out, you went to Bhuvaneshwar, there are all these enthusiastic, mostly men
#
who are, you know, doing all of what they're doing. But the other is just this greater
#
awareness among citizens of what is going wrong. And I think understanding economics,
#
understanding incentives, understanding scarcity, all of that has a big role to play in that.
#
And therefore my question on funding is this, and I think it might have come up in a different
#
form in our episode also, Shrana, is that in everything else, I find that things like
#
funding and support are in a sense decentralized and no longer so dependent on authorities
#
or mainstream platforms. So if I want to write a book, for example, sure, there might be
#
themes which are popular in the publishing world which are chasing a formula and chasing
#
a trend, but I can write what the hell I want. And in the creator economy, you are no longer
#
dependent on gatekeepers. And you can in fact even crowdsource whatever funding you might
#
need for your work. And increasingly you see this in more and more ways, even if you don't
#
call it crowdsourcing. Everyone who's successful in the creator economy, you know, whatever
#
they earn through what they do, they can put it into what they do next, as indeed I do.
#
So is there then a possibility of, you know, economics escaping this circle jerk and escaping
#
this whole game of having to influence policy to be influential? Because I think the greatest
#
impact that economics can really have is that people see the world differently. Today people
#
look around them and, you know, the sort of economic illiteracy and how that affects the
#
way they look at the world, it just makes me very pessimistic. But I think that's where
#
we kind of need to work harder. So just some rambling thoughts. What do you guys think?
#
It's not rambling, but I may be wrong in this, but I think what happens is that at the end
#
of the day, let's say you want to earn your livelihood as an economist, right? You want
#
to earn a living. Somebody has to pay you money, right? Unless you have enough money
#
that you can just sit on it and do freelance economists. I mean, that also many people do
#
and that's fine, but that's a very, very small percentage. So let's not go there. So if you
#
want to earn your living as an economist, somebody has to pay you. And the question
#
is, who's that somebody going to be? Is it very safe, a university, a corporate, a think
#
tank, an NGO, a decentralized local level organization? There has to be somebody who
#
pays you the money and whoever is paying you the money, it's not free lunch. That entity
#
wants you to do some things in a certain way, right? While we say that as academics or as
#
economists or as intellectuals, we have certain freedom, that freedom is also not unchecked
#
and restricted, right? Now this gets significantly worse when you're talking about funding agencies.
#
Because when it comes to funding agencies, let's say I want to break free from the university
#
system, right? I want to break free from institutions. I want to break free from think tanks, everything.
#
And I just want to, as I said, set up my own center where I can do whatever I want, talk
#
to the common man, explain economics in the common language, everything that I want to
#
do. Who's going to pay me the money to do that? The funding agencies are not interested
#
in that. Unless you are doing this in the field that they think will have policy implications,
#
right? And therein comes the whole policy circle. That unless the government or the
#
powers that we are interested in this field, the funding agencies have no incentive to
#
fund that particular field, which means you're back to square one. Then you suddenly don't
#
have the freedom to talk about X, Y, Z in economics that you actually are passionate
#
about. But then you have to cater to what the funding agencies want you to do and what
#
the policy makers want you to work on. So I think therein lies the conundrum that we
#
haven't reached the level of sophistication of, I don't want to use the word GDP growth,
#
but we haven't reached the sophistication of a certain level of income of the country
#
where there is funding for any kind of discipline that a person wants to study and research
#
in. And therefore, because there is a pyramidal impact, there is sort of like a precious resources
#
being allocated across a large number of disciplines, economics sort of is on the back burner. It's
#
a compared to, let's say, the hard sciences, computer science and engineering research,
#
which attracts a lot more funding. Economics as a social system and other social sciences
#
are worse off, but we are still better off on that front. But even there, we sort of
#
fall on the back burner. And then all of these jostling comes about that what is the field
#
that you're interested in, but no, sorry, there is no funding in that. So therefore,
#
you can't do anything in it. So it's not easy to break free from that and yet sustain
#
I've been thinking about this actually a lot of late. And I think there are a couple of
#
things that I feel, which are actually in the realm of, again, what the McKinsey consultants
#
would like low hanging fruit. I think the first is we have to think of more market clearing
#
mechanisms of matching demand for certain research grants with those who have the resources
#
to do it domestically. Because right now, I think we are living in a fool's paradise
#
if we think this whole situation with the FCRA is going to. It's just too complicated.
#
I also don't understand it enough to be perfectly honest. It's just very messy. But I think
#
that there are enough deep pockets domestically. It's just that they're financing a lot of
#
other kinds of work. A lot of money is going into invisible electoral bonds. It might be
#
nice if some of that is. So I think some of it I'm looking honestly to the private sector.
#
And I think I'm looking to technology platforms, VCs to say, can we think about a way a certain
#
proportion of the CSR funding is pooled and you create some kind of a matching platform.
#
There is no reason, Amit, which you described about the creator economy cannot be true for
#
a lot of, and in fact, a lot of these research projects, you know what Rajeshwari described,
#
it's not expensive. It's not like you're asking for core institutional grants sometimes. It
#
might just be a small piece of work and there ought to be ways to just match. So I think
#
this is an open challenge to anyone listening to us or anyone in the private sector who
#
can create an aggregator platform. Let's try and think about creating something that does
#
matching, right? That's one. I think the second is there have to be, I think, some rules and
#
norms in place to say that some part of the ICSSR, if I've got the acronym right, and
#
each time nowadays I mentioned this acronym, my friends in Delhi, at least all look very
#
like the shoulders start to slump. I think there has to be some mechanism where, yes,
#
of course, one is despondent about reforms, but institutions do change and institutions
#
have to be updated. We have to think very carefully about some of these social science
#
research institutions. What can be changed? And we do currently have a government, you
#
know, for good or for bad, is very big on administrative reform. There's a lot actually
#
that can be done, which will tow any party line, which will make anyone look good. So
#
I think we need to attack the fundamental problem, which is the way the government organizes
#
is also being a principal funder of a lot of this research. Either we say, well, part
#
of the government should just get out of it. That's also a possibility. Or we start to
#
think very carefully about how do we in the current contemporary world that we live in,
#
organize these institutions. So that's the second. And I don't think that that again
#
is so difficult. It's possible to do. I think the third has to be, we need to think about,
#
and this I know gets a little controversial because this is where you start introducing
#
distortions, but I really do think we need to think about financing ecosystems in smaller
#
cities. There has to be some, I'm almost thinking like affirmative action for towns where we
#
say that funding has to go to core universities in places which are really, because if you
#
look, I can actually show you a map right now and I'm sure this is not going to surprise
#
Rajeshwari or you Amit, but funding is very geographically concentrated. Everything is
#
going and by the way, it's not because researchers are often there now. In fact, many researchers
#
are in all parts of the country, but it's because the accounting ability, the capacity
#
to process the money, to do the procurement, all of that is actually sitting in the big
#
cities, which is where money goes there. If you start to put in rules, which almost create
#
this distortion and artificial allocation, maybe then we start to build, there were these
#
good governance centers coming out, for example, from Madhya Pradesh. I'll give you that one
#
example. Those organizations, they've done so much for the Lokseva Kendras and the right
#
to time-bound services in the state of Madhya Pradesh. This is also true for smaller towns
#
in Karnataka because they were doing governance research, but it was some financing from government
#
along with organizations coming in to support and it worked really well because now if you
#
go to Madhya Pradesh, there is, I mean, for good or for bad, there is a thriving community
#
of people who can explain the governance structures down to the bone to anyone who wants to understand
#
which is useful for politicians. It's useful for what you were saying, citizens knowing
#
more about how government is organized, right? We need to put in these, there has to be some
#
rules and norms such that the geographical concentration of the funding pipelines have
#
to just radically change. It will make people like me very unhappy because people like me
#
want funding for projects that I want to do based out of Delhi, but I think it's time
#
that people like me were a bit more frustrated and others received, I think, more of the
#
allocations. I think that's the third. Last thing, actually, I said three things, but
#
actually I have a fourth thing, which is I really have been wondering a lot about if
#
we were to measure our MPs or our MLAs on the measure of economic decision-making. I
#
mean, it's a very, again, this is something I've just been thinking about. It's very
#
important. How do you start to crystallize that? It can't be growth because it's not
#
something that they control and Rajeshwari will get angry at me if I even try and suggest
#
that, but they have to be, is it roads? Maybe not because that's done by the central ministry.
#
Can we think about incubating a research group within one of our larger, more prestigious
#
think tanks? And again, this is an open challenge to anyone listening who thinks very carefully
#
about how do we almost create this kind of evidence-based, citizen-centric conversation
#
around how well is my MLA doing when it comes to managing the local economy? How much does
#
the MLA even control of the local economy? What can the MP do? Have they made speeches
#
in parliament on the way certain economic decisions are being made? How have they supported
#
the GST rationalization process as the government is trying to figure out how to implement it
#
better? There have to be methods through which we can hold political officials much more
#
accountable on the economy. I think what's happened is there was a method to try and
#
do these citizen report cards. It's happened. Often they're very simple service delivery
#
measures. Often ADR has done a lot on corruption, saying how many people have cases against
#
them. But can we think very hard about supporting, and again, perhaps this will require large
#
trusts and donor organizations or the private sector to support a very thought-through conversation
#
on measuring, firstly, the performance of a political office when it comes to at least
#
the local rules of the economy that they do manage, because it's not like they can completely
#
wash their hands off it. There are things that do sit in their control. And how do we
#
sort of foster that conversation? I think, Amit, this goes back to what you were saying
#
as well, which is that we see, for example, with the app, it was that conversation around
#
corruption and holding MLAs and local officials politically accountable for corruption that
#
fostered an entire social and political movement. Why don't we have that for lemon prices? Right
#
now we're all discussing inflation. Can we think about breaking it down in simple ways
#
so that the ordinary public who is consuming this information can understand it, hold their
#
local officials more accountable? Anyway, so this is just a list of four things.
#
Yeah, I mean, a couple of, you know, with this last point, and I'll go back to the earlier
#
ones, but a couple of issues that I see coming up here is, number one, our MPs can actually
#
do nothing. They're powerless, partly because of the anti-defection law. I've had episodes
#
on that with Barun Mitra and M. R. Madhavan, I link them from the show notes. But you can
#
run parliament from an Excel sheet. MPs are not allowed to go against the party line.
#
What the PMO decides is effectively what every BJP MP and MLA in this country is bound to.
#
So what do you hold them accountable for when you don't have the power? The second issue
#
is I'd done an episode with our mutual friend long ago, Shruti Rajgopalan, who has recorded
#
with both of you in different ways. And also as a question for you guys, I'll bring up
#
later, but which was about urban governance. And her point was that at the local level,
#
there is a disconnect between power and accountability, that, for example, the person who's, you
#
know, standing to be an MLA in Maharashtra or in Bombay or who, you know, their vote
#
base is different. Nobody is looking at an urban vote bank in Maharashtra. They're looking
#
at all the different rural vote banks and all of that. Now, you might be worried about,
#
you know, why is the garbage not being picked up from outside? But the person you can vote
#
for does not control that. And the person who does control that is outside your control.
#
So there is that disconnect between power and accountability, which is also a question
#
which greater local self-governance would of course help. But you know, Amit, on that,
#
and there is actually work in economics and in political science coming out of the US,
#
Latin America that shows when you start to even create noise about holding local officials
#
accountable, it also then fosters inner party friction. Because right now what you have
#
is one word goes, because there's also not, you know, there's no incentive for an MLA
#
or an MP now to fight that or fight against that sort of party line, because they are
#
not necessarily being fully impacted or held to account for it. And I think I see and I,
#
my sense is if we actually, and this is, I think this is why it's an open research question,
#
to what extent can we hold political officials accountable? Or is it just that there is only
#
everyone in the Ministry of Finance and the RBI who can be held accountable for what's
#
happening in the economy? I don't think that that's true. I think there is actually different
#
levels and levers of control that are available, and either you're just not exercising them,
#
in which case then people need to know. And there has to be a more well thought out method
#
to do that. Because right now we just don't have that conversation. I mean, in the US,
#
you have conversations around lobby groups, right? And we see that a lot. We just don't
#
see that very clearly in our country. But who is, you know, where are we holding our
#
political officials accountable on questions around the economy, if it isn't them profiteering
#
off the economy in corruption? I mean, in a different way. And that's something I hope
#
someone takes up. And I'm not completely sort of, you know, throwing that out just because
#
MLAs and MPs don't have control over all decisions. I think there's a way you can do it. Sorry,
#
So I think accountability has become a pervasive problem now, right? I mean, I see instances,
#
for example, I was shocked that you do something like demonetization, and you get away with
#
it, right? And you win a large state election right after demonetization. To me, that was
#
a shock. I mean, there was not a single protest all over the country. And it was a nationwide
#
shock. And there was no protest. I mean, other than some small sporadic protests in Bengal.
#
But in Bengal, there's a culture of protesting everything. But other than that, there was
#
no protest anywhere in the country. And then you saw the election results. Then you have
#
the second wave of the COVID pandemic. And we all lived through the horrors of it. And
#
then you see the election results. And you think and wonder what's the connect between
#
holding the state, the government at any level accountable for what happened and who I'm
#
going to vote for. So this to me has become almost a puzzle that how do you enforce accountability
#
at any level of governance when it's become very easy for the government to win elections
#
through bread and circus by providing rations and cheap internet, where everybody's going
#
to vote on the basis of short term gains at the cost of long term pens. And therefore,
#
where is the accountability for larger things like any of the economic issues you talk about,
#
right? You talk about health care, you talk about education, you talk about corruption,
#
you talk about infrastructure, things that we like to talk about. But when you go to
#
the common man, what is he or she voting on? She's voting on, do I have a cooking gas connection?
#
Do I have water? Do I have electricity? Do I have a house? These are also important.
#
But what it has boiled down to is that the government is using its limited resources
#
to provide basic goods and services as opposed to providing public goods and services, so
#
to speak, right? And therefore, that accountability mechanism, I am happy because I can access
#
clean water, clean cooking gas and a house, which for large spools of Indian population,
#
that's very important. So am I going to hold the government accountable for rendering 86%
#
of the cash invalid overnight? My life is miserable as it is, it's a little bit marginally
#
more miserable, but at least I have access to clean gas and clean water, et cetera, right?
#
Or am I going to hold? So I think what is the connect of the citizen with the government?
#
Does the average citizen even interact with the government on a regular basis? And I don't
#
think they do. So therefore, in the minds of the citizenry, government is somebody who's
#
providing me with the basic goods and services, I'm happy with it, and therefore come elections
#
for whatever compulsions I'm going to vote for such and such local party member. Beyond
#
that, they're not holding the government accountable for any of the things that we think are important.
#
So I think there is a disconnect between that interaction between government on a day to
#
day basis and a citizen's daily life. And it's very easy for a government to sort of win
#
over that interaction by providing these basic goods, which is exactly what has gotten entrenched
#
in Indian polity over the last several decades. So who do you hold accountable for what? I
#
mean, how do you hold RBI accountable for what it's doing? How do you hold Minister
#
of Finance? I'm not even going at the decentralized level. At the centralized level, there's no
#
accountability. At the decentralized level, there's no accountability. I mean, think of
#
the Bengal elections. I know Bengal because I'm from Bengal. How do you win elections?
#
You float a lot of schemes which are women-centric. Women come out in hordes to cast votes. That's
#
a remarkable thing. Great. But why are the women voting? Because most of the schemes
#
are directed towards women. Is there any emphasis on job creation? Is there any emphasis on
#
actually building infrastructure assets or anything that's going to promote long term
#
sustainable job creation and growth? No. So it's become increasingly easy for political
#
parties to win elections, which is what they most care about. And in that kind of a system
#
where you can just win elections by providing freebies and basic goods, how do you hold
#
anybody accountable? Where is the accountability? Can I just, I hear what Rajeshwari is saying.
#
I disagree with the, you know, this is not, now this is my Bengali lefty self, the little
#
bit of the Bengali in me. I'm kidding. But I disagree with, let's not, they're not freebies
#
because we do live in a world, particularly coming out of the pandemic, where most of
#
the country is between the poverty line and twice the poverty line. I mean, this is a,
#
we are, it's, it's a really dire situation. Extreme poverty has reduced in India, continues
#
to reduce, but precarity has just increased incredible levels. We know from RCTs across
#
the globe and also work that's happening in India, that you need some assurance and these
#
transfers are very important. I think what needs to happen, and I know Amit, maybe we'll
#
come to this later. I think one of the core reforms that certainly something in my work
#
I'm really pushing is India needs to have a social protection policy. What other countries
#
would call a social protection policy. I think it links to what Rajeshwari is saying, which
#
is you need to have a fiscal path on which these kinds of entitlements and programs operate.
#
So if you look at, you know, Brazil or Mexico and many of these countries, you essentially
#
have a very clear policy path, which says certain X share on spending. There are limits
#
and rules. There are rules of the game. I think what's happened here is you have 20
#
pension schemes. They're targeting the same person and often the person who's supposed
#
to get it doesn't get it, right? There are all these issues. I think there has to be
#
a way. And first you need to bind different groups of government into a policy framework.
#
Right now we don't think about it like that. I think some states are thinking about it
#
like that. And I'm hoping, you know, in the future that this is something that the national
#
government at least will have to think about because it's also fiscally unsustainable
#
beyond a path. Having said that, I think I agree with everything Rajeshwari just said.
#
But what I will say is, I mean, jobs, for example, it's just fascinating to me. Jobs
#
and inflation, actually. And I'm curious to hear what Rajeshwari and you, Amit, have
#
to say. I don't know, coming out of the UP election, I think all of us had this moment
#
of tremendous, I don't know, I don't even call it pause. I think it was just somewhat
#
sharp, because is it the case that jobs just don't matter anymore? I was seeing some really
#
interesting journalists reporting out of UP essentially saying, similar to what I think
#
Rajeshwari is saying, which is that as long as you have a core set of entitlements, but
#
it's interesting because I also know the data and UP to know that the people who actually
#
are targeted for, I mean, who should be receiving priority for those entitlements, don't get
#
the full basket. Is it that that just doesn't, is it that jobs just don't politically matter?
#
I think that's an open question. And honestly, it's something that I don't have an answer
#
to. I know that women's jobs don't matter at all. I don't think anyone cares. I think
#
we are very happy with equilibrium in the employment landscape when it comes to women.
#
But I'm wondering whether jobs just have stopped mattering as a political issue. I mean, did
#
they matter in the history of our country's economy? I wonder. I mean, this is a question
#
for us to think about. And the same for inflation. I mean, look at what's happening right now.
#
Now, in fact, I do see, of course, the opposition has picked up on it. But I wonder that, and
#
I don't know if it's just honestly, Rajeshwari, I don't know whether it's just that you've
#
been sedated as an electorate through welfare, because actually not everyone is receiving
#
the welfare transfers. I mean, it's not also, we saw what happened with migrants going back
#
during the crisis. The One Nation, One Russian card is yet to fully take off. It's not the
#
case that everybody is receiving the entitlements. In fact, you have activists arguing for deeper
#
entitlements because there are concerns about some people just being completely left out.
#
So I wonder what's going on. I mean, what are you, I mean, if jobs and inflation are
#
not political issues anymore, which all of us in our training were told that, well, they
#
are and they should be, I wonder what is the labour market now? Is the labour market basically
#
getting paid to, I don't know, harass people online? I mean, are those the jobs that we
#
are going to create? I wonder, is that now what the job market is? It's an open question
#
Sir, I have several points to make, Amit, if I can. So one is that I do agree that the
#
pandemic was obviously, it's an outlier rare event, right? And when a rare event like this
#
hits a country, you need to do redistribution because the situation is absolutely dire.
#
But I think there is a case to be made that redistribution should focus more on rare events
#
rather than become a norm. And I think what we have internalized is we have a redistributive
#
model of development. And that is what we have internalized over the decades. And that
#
is what gets used in election cycle to basically win the elections. And that's where the accountability
#
breaks down, right? So basically, I guess what I'm trying to say is that if the common
#
voter is happy with the basic goods that are being provided irrespective of a pandemic,
#
then what is the incentive of that common voter to say that, no, I'm going to hold you
#
accountable for all these other problems that's happening in my locality, right? I think that
#
incentive structure is very weak. And that is something that has somehow smoothly happened
#
if there's one thing that has smoothly happened in India over the decades. It is this idea
#
that you can give the common man these basic goods and services and he or she is okay with
#
it because you're starting from such a low level that you provide that and they need
#
that basic standard of life and the government is providing that. And then they no longer
#
feel the necessity to hold the government accountable for all the things that we think
#
are important in the long run, right? And the second thing is, I think jobs were never
#
really that important when it came to winning elections, right? Because India traditionally
#
has had a very high unemployment rate or a very low employment rate, because I don't
#
particularly trust the official unemployment numbers. But if I just look at CMI's labor
#
force participation rate, right? We've always had a very miserable statistic as far as jobs
#
is concerned. So any incremental improvement on that almost feels like something great
#
has happened. And I completely agree that women's abysmally low LFPR just does not matter
#
to anybody. That's not even an electoral agenda. But basically, the fact that jobs have never
#
really been a decision making point when it comes to winning elections says a lot about
#
what is it that the people of India really care about, right? And that's where I think
#
if you're getting the welfare entitlements and you're okay and you're not holding the
#
government responsible for not having jobs. So I think the accountability is not directly
#
being lined with the government not providing jobs. But I think what does matter is inflation.
#
In fact, 2014 election was lost on two counts. I think one was corruption and one was inflation,
#
because prices were exorbitantly high. And inflation is like the tax on the poor people,
#
right? And it's the worst tax on the poor people. So when you have uncontrollable inflation
#
that you're just not able to manage, I think that definitely becomes a very deep political
#
problem. And that's what I would be very curious to see what happens in 2024, because we definitely
#
have lost control on inflation the way things are looking like. So I think jobs is something
#
that the voter perhaps does not worry about as much when it comes to voting, but inflation
#
definitely something and corruption. I think one of the reasons the government got away
#
with demonetization was that the selling point was this is an anti-corruption measure. And
#
they feel so the average person feels so strongly about corruption, that it was easy to even
#
get away with something like demonetization. But I think inflation will be much harder
#
to get away with and something has to be done soon. But I constantly worry about accountability.
#
I mean, in a democracy, our only weapon of holding the government accountable is elections.
#
And if that's where this whole connect has broken down, how do you hold anybody accountable?
#
I think I'll double down on what you just said and what you said earlier, because that
#
was actually the third doubt I had about your point of making politicians more accountable
#
through good economics. Because my cynical take there is that ultimately you hold people
#
accountable on the basis of what you believe about them. And it comes down to narratives,
#
not facts. And often good economic narratives are much harder to sell. For example, I think
#
we'd all agree that you should allow FDI in retail, because it's good for people at large
#
and so on and so forth. I mean, hardly needs to be stated. But it's very easy for a politician
#
to oppose it by saying, what about the small traders? What will happen to their livelihoods?
#
Look at the scene effects and not the unseen effects around the line, so on and so forth.
#
And those narrative battles are ones which are hard to win.
#
In fact, I'll give you another big example, Amit. For the longest of time, we were fighting
#
with this FRDI bill, which is resolution of financial firms. And it's a very, very important
#
policy step to take, because while we have a bankruptcy procedure when non-financial
#
firms go bankrupt, and how do you resolve them? There is absolutely nothing for financial
#
firms, for banks, et cetera. Of course, it's a different matter in India. Banks never fail.
#
But that doesn't mean that they are healthy. I mean, it's just like a facade that we are
#
all very comfortable with. But then how do you deal with failed financial firms? And
#
there was a bill that was almost tabled, and a lot of people we know, they worked on the
#
bill. But then the FRDI bill got completely shelved, because the narrative got spun in
#
a very different way that the common man is going to lose bank deposits. The common man
#
is going to get the raw deal, because there is no insurance against deposits and what's
#
going to happen. And immediately, the whole political narrative changed, and you lost
#
the popular support, and the bill got shelved. But I guess that therein lies the importance
#
of the powers that be to realize what is important for the economy in the long run, or for the
#
country for the long run as a strategy, as opposed to just selling something that will
#
be very popular for the voters. But that's, again, never going to happen, because public
#
choice theory would tell you the politician is focused on the next elections. And that's
#
our constant conundrum. But here's the thing. So just a couple of things. So let's take
#
Chhattisgarh. I'm just going to keep going back to Chhattisgarh for some reason. Chhattisgarh
#
was one of the first states after Tamil Nadu to say, well, we'll universalize the food
#
Russian program. And you did have that particular Mr. Raman Singh's government. They came back
#
to power a few times, but eventually they lost as well. And it's not for the welfare
#
transfers were working well. There are many states, in fact, where they've universalized
#
the welfare programs, a core set, and yet you've had churn. And so clearly, I want us
#
to sort of think a bit more critically, because I think it's become now I hear this amongst
#
a lot of economists, which is, well, you know, it's sort of it's just welfare for votes or
#
handouts, right? It was just another word I don't like. I think there's something deeper
#
going on. I think what's happening is it's also in relation to what's happening to other
#
markets. Because if you have a job market, that's always been precarious. I think part
#
of the reason why jobs have never really been a political agenda. And this is going back
#
to, you know, you have a largely informal economy, jobs are extremely ad hoc, they are
#
human arrangements, right? What are jobs? I mean, it's a set of relationships. And in
#
that world where there's always flux, I'm not surprised that people think that, well,
#
you know, politicians can necessarily not intervene. However, what did happen was there
#
was NREGA. And when NREGA did happen, it has completely I mean, there are studies that
#
show really rigorous work that shows it has radically transformed the, you know, the reservation
#
wage for someone involved in the rural economy. And that's really important intervention.
#
Now, I don't see again in politics, people necessarily perhaps after a certain point
#
holding any politician accountable for how well NREGA is functioning in a particular
#
state. And in some states, NREGA ought to function because agrarian job markets and
#
labor markets are really breaking down. And you would think in that context, and especially
#
in inflationary context as well, NREGA is self-selection, you're supposed to demand
#
that work. And it is a job market intervention. I mean, it's not just a welfare scheme, it's
#
actually trying to attack the labor market. And yet I don't see, it's not necessarily
#
yet as politicized a scheme as at a point of time it used to be, right? And I wonder,
#
and I don't have an answer for this. I mean, these are just questions I have. I wonder
#
Maybe I think if I may just interrupt, maybe because the NREGA was and I agree, it's a
#
brilliant scheme. And I think we should have an urban NREGA as well after what happened
#
in the pandemic. But I think it's because NREGA was essentially a brainchild of the
#
previous government. And maybe that's why we don't see NREGA come repeatedly and showcased
#
as because it is a successful strategy. And in fact, it was a savior during the pandemic.
#
But what we saw in the budget is that the government has actually reduced that location
#
on NREGA. And maybe that would not have happened if it was their brainchild. But I'm just brainstorming
#
But I think Rajeshwari, actually I do have to say, I think when it comes to welfare,
#
there's tremendous continuity across political lines. In fact, that's one thing that's very
#
interesting about the Indian polity. And I know that that bothers some who think about
#
it as sort of, again, as you were saying, like this sort of distorts clear accountability
#
mechanisms distorts other markets as well. Right. But what's interesting to me, for example,
#
is NREGA actually for the previous budgets, the allocations actually increased under a
#
different political dispensation. In fact, this government has used the National Food
#
Security Act to even open up further. So I almost see this deepening. I think what's
#
happening though, is that while the welfare story is sort of, you know, moving along a
#
certain path, I think the question really is, we now have a welfare system which is
#
very broad in that there are lots of schemes. Currently there are around 464 national programs.
#
States have their own. A state like Kerala even has programs at the panchayat level.
#
And yet the depth is very limited. So the actual amount that people are receiving is
#
very small. And I suspect actually the reason why you almost have this rewarding of schemes
#
is precisely because you don't have one large lump sum transfer. My sense is that if we
#
actually thought very cohesively in a way about welfare, it would actually be beneficial
#
for politicians as well, because you could say, well, these are, this is a national transfer.
#
Maybe the state government does a top up NREGA and PDS function. And then let's think about
#
consolidating all these other legacy programs. But I just don't, again, and this is something
#
that is good politics. It would be good economics, but I just don't see again the energy to sort
#
of move in that direction. Perhaps we'll see it. There is an election coming up soon. Maybe
#
we'll see it. But I think to just go back to, I agree with what you said, Rajeshwari,
#
but I also wonder, you know, I think the reason why welfare keeps coming up to be this important
#
electoral almost issue is because actually the benefits are so small and you're not even
#
guaranteed if you work on NREGA. We know, studies show you don't even know when you'll
#
get your wages. There are wage backlogs for a very long period of time. And so I think,
#
you know, there is this, so it's almost transactional because the actual depth of the benefits and
#
what people are receiving is so unsure and insecure. So I think going back to the question,
#
I think the idea of holding a local politician accountable for good economic choices, it's
#
not just sort of, you know, what can you do on broad budget, broad bills and budget bills
#
and so on and so forth. I think it's also the local economy because there are roles
#
and again, this is a research question. What are the roles and levers that a local politician
#
has to impact the local labor market? I'm thinking of NREGA as one of them because they
#
do exert tremendous influence on the way panchayats are able to administer or push them to administer
#
certain programs. I wonder if there are others as well. I suspect PM Kisan is one of them.
#
Just as an example, it's the quasi basic income for certain groups of farmers. And I think
#
that's where I think we should think a bit more carefully about how do we start to at
#
least generate more evidence, which I realize then goes back to that circle of, well, we
#
need to raise resources for that kind of work. But I think that's, I feel like that's really
#
where maybe we're not talking about what economists are doing, but what economists now ought to
#
be thinking about and doing. So let's see. I mean, as an aside, I would say that just
#
going back to the resources question, I think there are new ways of thinking about it, which
#
will become more and more popular, like what Shruti does with emergent ventures, for example,
#
where you just give money to someone and then you don't ask any questions. You just give
#
it to them. And I really like that model where you identify the people you trust, who you
#
feel will do interesting work, and then you don't ask any more questions after that. You
#
trust those people to do whatever it is they do that works. I think that deeper kinds of
#
crowdsourcing can also work over time. It just doesn't have to be either the government
#
or institutions or even, you know, private companies deciding to do this. I think it
#
can also come from a different place. And as far as people, you know, not voting with
#
where the interest should lie, I would say a lot of that is also apathy. Like there's
#
this beautiful saying from Kashika Asi, which has almost become a cliche on the show because
#
I love it so much. The harmonia one. Yeah. I think that's everyone's attitude, man,
#
because nobody expects anything from any government after 70 something years of misgovernance,
#
basically. Now, I want to focus on a different question and go on a rant that might seem
#
unrelated but in a sense is unrelated. A couple of people on Twitter, you know, where we solicited
#
questions spoke about inequality, right? And, you know, I had written a column which I linked
#
from the show notes pointing out that, listen, inequality is a Western obsession. You know,
#
it's a luxury of the elites. We need to focus on poverty. Poverty and inequality are completely
#
different things. And the reason people conflate the two is really zero-sum thinking, which
#
is something pervasive that economists have to fight all the time. That, you know, if
#
somebody is getting poorer, somebody must be getting richer and therefore inequality
#
and poverty, they go together. Now, that's not the case. Inequality and poverty often
#
go in opposite directions. Like one thought experiment question I like to ask people is
#
in which of these two countries would you rather be poor, Bangladesh or the USA? And
#
obviously you'd rather be poor in the USA and the USA has far more inequality than Bangladesh
#
does. In fact, countries like USA, Hong Kong, Singapore, the United Kingdom have greater
#
inequality than Bangladesh, Liberia, Pakistan and Sierra Leone. But these last four countries
#
I named have greater poverty, right? Now, what has happened after liberalisation is
#
we've lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty as inequality has increased.
#
This is counterintuitive because you would imagine that, you know, poverty and inequality
#
go hand in hand. Now, I find that when many people, when they talk about inequality, they
#
actually mean poverty. They're thinking of the plight of poor people. But that's a different
#
thing and I think language kind of matters. Inequality per se need not necessarily be
#
a problem. I think it's a big problem in another domain, which I'll ask you about Rajeshwari
#
later because you're a macroeconomist and therefore the perfect person for that. Now,
#
and you know, another illustration of why inequality is not a big deal, poverty is throughout
#
history people have moved from towns to cities, villages to towns. They're moving towards
#
a place of greater inequality because what matters is escaping poverty. And the reason
#
I say this is that the solutions for both are often opposite, right? And I think that
#
there is a trade-off between redistribution and growth. I think what you really need to
#
do is, and I agree with you that in a desperately poor country, where some 8,000 children die
#
every day of starvation, you need certain kinds of welfare policies to alleviate that
#
and NREGA is a great thing. However, I would like to live in an India where NREGA is not
#
necessary, where, you know, the rising tide has lifted all boats, where we have greater
#
economic growth. So I just want to kind of conceptually be sort of clear about this.
#
Like I go by, like Harry Frankfurt wrote a book called On Inequality where he came up
#
with this concept I love, which is a doctrine of sufficiency. And that guides my thinking
#
that my thinking is guided by does every person have enough to live a life of sufficiency,
#
which you can define any way you want, right? And I won't have a problem with whatever
#
definition you come up with, but the idea is let's take everybody there, let's get
#
out of poverty. And therefore I find that there is this sort of, you know, when we conflate
#
these two and, you know, when we use inequality, when we mean poverty and when we come up with
#
policies that might help inequality by making everybody equally poor, you know, that becomes
#
an issue. So when we talk of welfare and redistribution, I get it at one level, but I also feel disturbed
#
at another level because the point is, for example, has become the rigor now for all
#
politicians in every election to say to the people farm loan waivers. Now farm loan waivers
#
to me might be a necessary anesthetic at a moment in time, but you are shifting the focus
#
from the larger, greater structural problems you need to resolve.
#
I don't even think that farm waiver is welfare policy because if you mean there are countries
#
Amit where they have thought very well about what their welfare state's architecture ought
#
to be like. China is one of them. Brazil is one of them. We can learn a lot from these
#
countries. They have very different instruments. They use co-financed models of welfare. So
#
there's social insurance as one example, in combination with certain things which are
#
universal transfers. We just, and I think this goes back to that point that I had made.
#
I mean, if there's one sort of dream reform in my mind, it is a very clear articulation
#
fiscally as well as between center state relations on what is the welfare architecture of India.
#
Are you going to continue to have 464 schemes or do you want to learn from in Indonesia
#
and maybe say, well, we'll have 10 big national schemes, NREGA and PDS, one of them. PMJ is
#
one of them, PM Kisan is one of them. I'm just throwing that out. And maybe the rest
#
we do as untied grants to states and let states then decide. And then that sort of harmoniously
#
manages some of the center state politics as well. There are ways to do this. Again,
#
one looks at the energy and enthusiasm. So to me, Amit, I think what I think we should
#
retire is this idea that there is this conflict between welfare, redistribution and certain
#
growth dividends when it comes to more productive assets and public goods provision. Actually
#
there are studies coming out of, you know, be it Sub-Saharan Africa, be it Latin America,
#
which show that if you do both carefully and together, they work very well. They're mutually
#
reinforcing because if you have, if you give people a basic level of cash, for example,
#
there is psychological assurance that you can take on risks in your businesses. You
#
can take on risks in the jobs that you'll do. You can invest in education, right? They're
#
both mutually reinforcing paradigms. But the question is, you need a policy articulation
#
on what the balance between the two is. I think it's the finance commission actually
#
where this needs to be articulated. They've done it quite well when it comes to disaster
#
response funds. There's a very clear articulation of how that will be done. It worked quite
#
well during the pandemic because state disaster response funds were being used, right? To
#
actually respond to local crises, because local crises are going to be very different.
#
The national government can't manage it. We need to think very carefully similarly around
#
the welfare question. So I don't disagree with, I think, in fact, what your concern
#
is, I share that concern, but to me, I think what I think we should not think of is that
#
the two are in conflict. I think there has to be a very clear policy path, much like
#
in other countries where they are not in conflict and they're cyclical. Because what is NREGA?
#
NREGA is not an anti-poverty program. I mean, people think it's that it's actually a shock
#
responsive safety net. So if you're in the middle of a shock, if you're dealing with
#
something, you respond. We can argue whether it actually responds in some places and it
#
doesn't in others based on local capacity. But I think you need to think very carefully
#
about what are the different instruments of welfare you're putting in. It has to be a
#
balance. You know, often, and now I realize I'm going into a rant on welfare policy and
#
I will try and be brief, but there are three instruments of welfare. One is what we call
#
protective measures, which is after you have fallen into poverty, it protects the poor,
#
right? That you won't fall further below in your income. So it's almost ex post. There
#
are preventive measures which tend to be much more co-financed because essentially you use
#
your money now to save for a crisis in the future. So social insurance and their promotional
#
measures. So that's skill training, livelihoods programs, all these kinds of things. If you
#
look at countries that have a healthy fiscal balance, right, of welfare, they use the three
#
based on what the local economy looks like. So, you know, context where they are relying
#
much more on agriculture, very susceptible to drought. You'll see, you know, crop insurance
#
mixed with food rations, with NREGA, right? Like some example like that. India actually
#
has the great privilege of having all these different contexts because right now we have
#
a welfare context where you have the same welfare programs running in urban, well, Maharashtra
#
as well as Delhi. That makes no sense because actually even the amount of transfers that
#
you need to give people are very different based on local consumption baskets, local
#
minimum wage. We have no policy articulation right now on how to tackle this balance. And
#
I think to me it's going to be one of the most important questions as economists, politicians,
#
anyone in the sort of technocratic welfare domain space. Right now I know we're in this
#
political moment where everybody wants deeper transfers and support because there are some
#
communities that are hurting. But I actually think the really important question is to
#
think about how do we move from just thinking of it as just transfers to thinking of it
#
as a policy path, which is fiscally sustainable so that those conflicts can be ironed out
#
a bit or you have platforms just like GST. You have platforms which are center state
#
which can organize then if there are conflicts which might happen. I think that's really
#
I think one thing that I completely agree with is that I think poverty is a bigger problem
#
than inequality. And I think when we focus too much on inequality, then we are trying
#
to solve a problem using policy actions and measures which may not necessarily address
#
inequality and it creates a lot of other distortions in the process. And I think there's unambiguous
#
evidence from the history of economic growth, so to speak, that the one thing that really
#
works in terms of uplifting people from poverty and improving the living standards is growth.
#
And there are, for example, my favorite examples of four countries which have made the transition
#
from a developing country status to an OECD developed country status, which is Israel,
#
Chile, South Korea, and Taiwan. And none of them did this using purely a redistributive
#
model of development, so to speak. I mean, they exclusively focused on growth-promoting
#
measures which were supported by the governments. And that is what helped them to make the transition.
#
I think there is no running away from the fact that the most important thing we need
#
to be focusing on is growth. And that is what's going to help over a period of time to alleviate
#
poverty, which is what has happened over the last several decades, barring the last few
#
years when even growth itself has stalled in India. And I think by focusing too much
#
on inequality, and there is a trade-off. The trade-off is because the fiscal resources
#
of the government are finite. And the reason they are also finite is because once you are
#
struggling on growth, your automatically your tax to GDP ratio, which is what the measure
#
of fiscal promise of the government is, that gets compromised, right? If you're not able
#
to sort of increase the tax base, then you are limited to a certain finite amount of
#
tax to GDP. And if you're not able to enlarge it, then you're sort of trying to choose between,
#
I have 100 rupees, what do I allocate this 100 rupees to? I have to do this 464 welfare
#
schemes. I have to do public good provision. I also have to do other things. And I think
#
the Indian state is really very badly stretched out in thousands of directions, right? I mean,
#
they are trying to do some rudimentary provision of public good and struggling at that. They're
#
trying to do welfare schemes. They're struggling at that. And they are doing many other things
#
that they should not be doing. And of course, struggling at that, right? So you have this
#
really finite limited fiscal resources, which are being pulled at from multiple angles.
#
And then you're choosing that what fire am I going to put out and what battle am I going
#
to fight and what's going to give me the highest returns in terms of, let's say, winning elections
#
and staying in power. And in the process, what definitely gets compromised is growth,
#
because the state is doing hajar things which are inimical to growth in the country. And
#
they need to figure out that, okay, let's take a step back from all of these things
#
and let growth take its course. And yes, when there are rare events, when there are catastrophic
#
events, we need to have the budget to spend at that point of time, which is what the government
#
was not able to do this time. Because for years, you've just been on a spending spree.
#
And when the time comes for you to actually provide the stimulus and the support needed,
#
you're suddenly worried about fiscal deficit and debt. So the entire thinking about how
#
do you support the economy in bad times? How do you sort of step back and build a surplus
#
during good times? And how do you step away from this interfering into the growth, which
#
should be the job of the private sector, that entire thinking has gone haywire? And I think
#
to a large extent, we tend to obsess about inequality. And what inequality does, I think,
#
it normalizes envy. I mean, there is this thing that, okay, if the rich are getting
#
richer, we should be envious of that. And that's just a very suboptimal outcome, so
#
to speak. So for example, when I teach my child or the values that I want to inculcate,
#
I don't want to tell her that be envious of the other kids in the building or the school.
#
I want to tell her that look at your own life in absolute terms, build your own character
#
and do the things that's going to make you happy, irrespective of whether what the other
#
person next to you is doing. But I think inequality, it's the state of the nature. There's inequality
#
everywhere. And I think at some point, we just have to stop obsessing about the fact
#
that economic policy actions should be catered towards addressing inequality. We should focus
#
on growth. And that is going to lead to the alleviation of poverty. One thing that I do
#
want to focus on here is, I think there should be equality of opportunities. So more than
#
income inequality or wealth inequality, etc. It's the equality of opportunities that probably
#
should receive a lot more focus on discussion. And that is where, again, we fail because
#
the state is being squeezed into multiple directions.
#
Yeah, I just want to say a couple of things. One, I want to just push on this idea. I don't
#
think there is a growth versus redistribution trade-off. I know this is something in a very
#
traditional sense in economics. I think we're taught this. But actually, there's a lot of
#
work that's coming out of, and I'm particularly thinking of, poor economics is about this,
#
right? I mean, there's an entire section of thinking about very careful, rigorous experiments
#
which show assets plus counseling, short-term transfers lead to businesses that grow, which
#
then there are long run spillover effects on the local economy, right?
#
So I do want to sort of push this idea that one of the big reasons why there's this whole
#
conversation on the basic income, for example, is this idea that in a precarious labor market,
#
you want some minimum assurance for everyone, so that everyone has the access to one fairly
#
large part of a significant transfer. In India, it may not need to go to everybody. You could
#
say it goes to, say, 80% of the informal economy, for example. And then at least with that assurance,
#
you're able to, as we say, partake in risk-taking behavior, all kinds of economic goods which
#
I don't necessarily see them in conflict. If there is a very clear, coherent policy
#
in place around social protection, which I would agree right now doesn't exist in India,
#
I think the two can be consonant and they can be enforcing.
#
I think if I can sort of push back on the pushback, I would sort of say that, one, I
#
agree that in theory, there may not be as much of a dichotomy as it may seem, that you
#
can have what you, as you described with a policy path, where you can have some welfare
#
policies happening and also growth happening. However, what happens in practice and what
#
happens in the political mindset and what happens when it comes to scarce resources,
#
as Rajeshwari said, is that there inevitably is a dichotomy in the sense that you will
#
always privilege welfare policies more.
#
Number one, because they're much easier to sell. It's much easier to tell a voter that
#
I'm giving you something as opposed to telling him that I'm going to do a structural reform
#
which will pay off in 10 years and blah, blah, blah. So in political sense, all your incentives
#
are towards just going for the welfare schemes, whether you call them handouts or freebies
#
or whatever. You're giving something directly. And also that then becomes a cop out. That
#
then becomes a way for you to say that I have done everything I could. And it becomes a
#
race to the bottom as it has with farm loan waivers. And you use it to not address any
#
of the core problems. The way I look at it is this is that, let's say I have a terrible
#
backache at my lower back, right? The immediate thing is to give me an anesthetic, to give
#
me a crocin or if it's more severe, to give me a good painkiller. And that then relieves
#
me of that pain. But the point is, you're not actually treating the disease. What if
#
I have pancreatic cancer, which lower back pain is one of the signs of. You're not creating
#
or treating the disease and you're also saying that, oh, I gave you something. Your pain
#
is better. I'm doing my job. So that's really my worry there, which is not to argue for
#
one or the other. What I would say is that I'm completely okay. My worry is that we just
#
think of welfarism all the time. Even this current dispensation has realized that they
#
can rely on well-delivered welfarism to take their eyes off the broader ball where they
#
can do nonsense like demonetization and the botched up GST and so on. And no one holds
#
them accountable, as Rajeshwari pointed out. So two points I'll make and over to you then,
#
Shaila. So one is that I think theoretically it makes sense to say that we'll do a basic
#
income scheme where we only target the most deserving and the needy people or let's say
#
X percentage of the population. But I think to execute something like that requires an
#
enormous level of sophisticated state capacity where you identify who the exact recipients
#
who are deserving are going to receive it, then ensure that there's not going to be any
#
leakage. So I think that I don't think we even have anywhere remotely that kind of state
#
capacity. And I think what happens is once you have 464 welfare schemes, it's very difficult
#
to withdraw any scheme because the incentive is to pile on more and more schemes rather
#
than withdraw anything, clean up the system and just say that we are only going to stick
#
to one scheme because fiscally we are constrained. I don't think that ever happens in reality.
#
And lastly, I think what this government has done is that I think they've cleaned up the
#
last mile delivery much better than the previous government. So I think while there are still
#
leakages, but the last mile delivery has significantly become better. And that again, going back
#
to my original point, that is where the accountability system becomes even more problematic because
#
if I'm actually getting the delivery of the welfare schemes better than what I used to
#
before, in my mind, this government is doing better than the previous government. And therefore,
#
what am I going to really hold this government accountable for? And lastly, I think the countries
#
which have a welfarist social state with the successful redistributive policy are also the
#
ones which have very high levels of GDP and per capita income, because that generates
#
the fiscal resources that you would need in order to continue and sustain an efficient
#
redistribution program. And also you have social spending on healthcare and education.
#
I mean, look at Indian government, the pandemic exposed it. Less than 2% of the GDP is being
#
spent on the healthcare, but you have a whole lot of welfare schemes, but that's the palliative
#
that Amit was mentioning about.
#
Okay, a couple of things. One, India spends about 2% of GDP on all of its welfare schemes.
#
So again, this goes back to the fact, I think we keep thinking that, in fact, in our mind,
#
I think we think the Indian government spends much more on welfare than it actually does.
#
So that's the first thing. And I think for those who are interested in the breakdown
#
on this, we have the World Bank and the IMF have a series of reports. I've authored some
#
of them looking at budgets. So I think it's not the case. In fact, we're spending health
#
and education. Certainly you could spend more, but it's not that there's a trade-off between
#
spending more on education, spending more on welfare, because that's not happening. Never
#
has happened in our politics. Number one. Number two, I think on the question of targeting,
#
actually, I mean, I work on targeting. In fact, the public distribution system and when
#
the pandemic hit, PMGKY showed you have the Jandhan Yojana, you have the public distribution
#
system. They are near universal. We have a paper for those who are interested. It's called
#
From Intent to Implementation. It uses CMI data to track what happened with PMGKY transfers.
#
And what we essentially find is not just us, there are others who've done surveys. And
#
what we find is the PDS distribution system actually in terms of identifying targeting
#
is extremely effective because it's universal and it's constantly being used. And one of
#
the things that people like Rajesh Bansal, who used to be in fact briefly at the RBI
#
was with the DBT mission, essentially wrote a paper saying, why don't we create a who-to-pay
#
database using the PDS? So actually, to your point about targeting and basic income, in
#
fact, now in policy conversations that I am part of, one constantly hears the lament that
#
this is so easy to do, and it would also then put a squeeze on the remaining 464. Why don't
#
we start to move in that direction? And some states have, so Tamil Nadu, for instance,
#
is using the PDS to essentially do an income transfer. There are other states that are
#
going to start to move in that direction. So actually, I think that the execution of
#
at least some of the basic income stuff is much more doable.
#
So I'm really glad we are all agreed on one thing. One, what a relief it is that that
#
damn drilling noise has stopped. I'm sorry, dear listeners, what happened was that suddenly,
#
unexpectedly, and this never happens, there was some drilling at an apartment upstairs
#
or downstairs, which you heard. So I went to the two flats upstairs, the two flats above
#
that and the two flats below me and finally two floors below me. There were people who
#
were drilling and they kindly offered to stop drilling. They did not understand recording.
#
So I had to tell them I'm live with BBC to London and I'm going to lose a lot of money.
#
Please. I really did say that. And then we kind of managed to sort of make them stop
#
the drilling. So I hope this episode is worth it. Now, yeah, so I mean, the lot of thought
#
provoking stuff on welfare and growth to think about. And what I'm glad about is at the fundamental
#
level, we are on the same page. Growth is important. There's no getting away from it.
#
And in the short term, you know, if you can alleviate the pain of people, that's a good
#
thing and it must be done. Unfortunately, this is often seen in dichotomous terms. And
#
my worry is that it ends up being a dichotomy in the political level. But leave that aside.
#
I want to actually now, you know, before we go to the break and we begin with and after
#
that, we'll talk about your life, Rajeshwari. You are not getting away from that. But before
#
that, I want to bring up one of the Twitter questions because I think it leads us to an
#
interesting area that both of you alluded to. And a couple of questions. Raghuram Janak
#
asks, where did we in brackets India go wrong economically in the last eight years and what
#
should be the key area of focus going forward? Nice Raghuram Janak and Jordan Khusro, which
#
is a delightful name, by the way. On Twitter, you never know if it's the real name. You
#
know, no one on the Internet knows I'm a dog. You've seen that old cartoon. No, but we're
#
not calling Jordan a dog. I'm just saying it's a nice name. And he asked, when did
#
India's economic decline start? Was it during Mughals or during British Raj or earlier than
#
that? And I'll attempt to brief answer to that and saying that, no, you don't need
#
to go so far back. The truth is that our economic governance has been miserable for most of
#
our history. There was a golden 20 year period from 1991 to 2011 when things were looking
#
up and were moving in the right direction. And for the last 10, 11 years or so, it's
#
been a disaster. I've got an episode with Pooja Mehra called The Lost Decade on her
#
book about, you know, how all of this happened. She takes you into the weeds and you get to
#
learn exactly in terms of policy what went wrong. And it started going wrong before this
#
particular dispension. And this particular dispension, of course, made it much worse
#
for reasons Rajeshwari mentioned, like demonetisation, the Bosch GST and so on. And I've also done
#
an episode on the 1991 reforms about why we did have that 20 year old golden period and,
#
you know, in terms of specific policies and how our way of thinking changed. You know,
#
and the point that I want to underscore here is that a number of the questions are also
#
talking about how right-wing economists have gone wrong. And I feel that this is people
#
who conflate Modi's economic policies with right-wing just because socially it's called
#
right-wing. I think the spectrum of left and right in India doesn't really work. But if
#
you really look at it, all of India's economics, except for parts of the 20 year period, have
#
been statist and therefore left-wing in a sense. Markets haven't been allowed to play.
#
I had the Congress politician Salman Sohz on the show. And Salman said that in 2014
#
Modi won. He was actually optimistic because of the noises Modi had made about freeing
#
up markets and getting away from stratism. Modi did nothing of that. He doubled down
#
on policies of the past. He showed the top-down central planning of Nehru. He showed the authoritarian
#
streak of Indira, if anything, the ruthlessness of Sanjay Gandhi even, and so on and so forth,
#
which is why we are in this mess. So this perception that some people have that, oh,
#
you know, left-wing versus right-wing, in economics, it's all fundamentally statist and there
#
is no freedom at all. In fact, all our parties are left on economics and right on social
#
issues. As Arun Shuri famously said, you know, a UPA is equal to NDA plus cow. And of course,
#
these days, I think what we sort of need to worry about is the cow aspect of it, of how
#
our society is torn apart. And there was another question from Twitter from a gentleman named
#
Rohit Tripathi saying, how long can economists ignore the coming apart of the social fabric?
#
It's a serious question. And to this, I just want to say that economists are not ignoring
#
any coming apart of the social fabric. Economists are people, just like people are. And every
#
economist I know is aghast at it. And there's another question, which this is a good time
#
to address, where someone I won't name because I'm going to diss the question. I asked about,
#
you know, what question should I ask you guys? And this person said, quote, ask them what
#
they were doing in the Niti Aayog when this government ran down the economy into pieces.
#
Ask why did they whitewash Modi? Stop quote. Why did you guys whitewash Modi?
#
I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about at this point of time.
#
I think this particular gentleman just saw the word economists and got enraged and triggered
#
by that and went off into this rant. And the truth is that I actually have a filter for
#
who I allow on the show. And one of my litmus tests is that if you support a demonetization,
#
you are never coming on the show. Right? I made one quasi-exception for Arvind Subramaniam
#
and I asked him all the tough questions. So if anyone feels that I don't ask stuff, don't
#
get those people on. And we had a very civil conversation, but I asked all the tough questions,
#
I think there is a huge amount of simplification that's happening here. Right? I mean, the
#
word economist is getting conflated with just this one kind of an entity who works for the
#
government and supports all the policies that's coming out of the PMO or the MOF and not protesting
#
all the bad things that's happening. There's some kind of a non-existent entity that's
#
in the minds of people.
#
I remember at the time of Demon, I wrote this strong editorial about useful idiots, Lenin's
#
phrase, not literally calling people idiots, where I said any economist who support demonetization
#
is either a bad economist or a bad human being. And I kind of stand by that. And every economist
#
I would lean more towards the latter.
#
More towards the latter.
#
Exactly. I completely agree.
#
Because all the examples that come to my mind are bad human beings to begin with.
#
Demonetization was an event that almost split the world into there are two kinds of people,
#
right? I mean, those who support and those who don't. It became crystal clear. And since
#
then it has just been a slippery slope.
#
No, and also I think, you know what, I mean, I don't know if one should be held culpable
#
for it, but there's also a failure on the part of economists. Like most, the majority
#
of economists, basically almost all economists opposed it because it is batshit crazy, as
#
my friend Sadanand Ume says. It's batshit. Right? And yet there is a public perception
#
that, oh, the economists supported Modi ji, all of which are completely untrue.
#
You know, but I'll tell you something. And I wrote a piece, in fact, at the end of last
#
year about this. So I go to a lot of Delhi parties, right? And this I think goes back
#
to this gentleman who was so enraged with the use of the phrase economist. I go to a
#
lot of Delhi parties and this was a new year's thing. And I'd been, and I was generally
#
talking to someone. And because as we know, I'm a nerd, I have really nothing else to
#
talk to people about other than the economy and numbers, right? I have really nothing
#
else. And so I was talking to some gentlemen in their fifties, who for some reason, all
#
of them have a crush on Millen Soman. I want everyone to know this.
#
A gentleman in his fifties.
#
Listen, Amit Rajeshwari, let me tell you, in North India now, amongst the elite gents,
#
this is something I believe, men in their fifties, they all want to be as fit as Millen
#
Soman is now that he is in his fifties. And I think they also aspire to like all his triathlete
#
abilities and all of that.
#
But it's a good thing to aspire to.
#
Even I would like to look like Millen Soman. I know it's kind of not possible.
#
It's a good aspiration to harbor.
#
Okay. I mean, I have other thoughts, which I will keep to myself for the time being.
#
But the point being, I remember I started, someone asked me what I did. And I mentioned
#
that I am an economist at the World Bank. Immediately, there was this sniggering cynicism
#
and they said, Oh, but you're an, and they said this in Hindi in almost half Tate Punjabi.
#
They said, but you're an economist. What will you know about the economy? And that is, I
#
think the current rep of the community. And I completely agree with Rajeshwari. I think
#
that is a, it's a strange kind of morphing of who you think an economist is. But the
#
other thing that makes it really complicated is that these were gentlemen who were all
#
running businesses and they felt, and this I think goes back to also the point that Amit
#
was making about how much we make economics accessible in the way people think about the
#
All these guys seem to believe that they had the pulse on the real economy because they
#
hired people, they were fighting with their workers, they were producing things. And they
#
said, we know, and what do you know? And I think there is this competition now, we do
#
live in this post-truth world. There is a competition about who gets to assert what
#
fact and how facts are constructed. And I think honestly, when I was sitting there,
#
I mean, at this particular social gathering, I realized it's very difficult because what
#
I can now share with them, they will just dismiss as technicalities. You know, this
#
is just, don't bore me with this stuff.
#
Also, I wonder to what extent social media has a role to play here, right? The kind of
#
economists who are vocal on social media are probably of a very different type, believing
#
in some things as wanting to support the government, wanting to come across as, I don't want to
#
criticize the government for anything, for whatever reason they may have in their minds.
#
And I think that's what the people who are also on social media get to witness and read.
#
And in their mind, these are the economists who have all the power and who have all the
#
prestige and everything, and they have access to the government, and they are the ones who
#
are messing up with the economy. So it's like, you know, that is what is getting created
#
using the social media. I'm completely guessing because I myself am not on social media.
#
See, you're like, I could say to you what the factory owner said to her, that, you know,
#
Yes, I don't know the economy because I'm not on social media.
#
In the sense, you don't know social media because you're not on social media.
#
The economy is nothing.
#
Which is why I said, I mean, what Shaina would not say in the party that I'm guessing, here
#
I am admitting, I'm guessing that this could be happening in social media.
#
My sense is, and you're right, what I'd add to this is that I think social media incentivizes
#
extreme expression because, and it's almost the opposite of what people call the median
#
voter theorem, right? The median voter theorem basically is that in a democracy with two
#
parties, both of them will be as close to the center as possible. They'll practically
#
be identical in the same way that if you have an ice cream vendor on a beach, you know,
#
he can put his cart anywhere, but if there are two of them, they'll both try to be as
#
close to the center as possible so they have the largest whatever, which is why in the
#
US, you used to have a situation where during the primaries, people would swing to the extremes
#
and talk to the core voters, but during the main elections, they'd be next to each other.
#
So when I look at 2016, for example, you know, two candidates from the different parties
#
who were really close to each other in everything were Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton.
#
And of course, someone on the extremes won and that swing to the extreme.
#
So I think what social media also does is once you join social media, if you get attracted
#
to say an ideological tribe of any kind on either side, if you want to raise your status
#
within that tribe, you know, how do you do it? By becoming more and more shrill and it's
#
a race to the extremes, like even that Mahasamillan of so-called Hindu priests, which we had,
#
you know, people like Yati Narasimhanand and all that, you know, if any of them was to
#
individually give a speech anywhere, I don't think they would be so rabid. But by the fact
#
that they're all together and they all want to stand out and in a sense are competing
#
for the attention. I think they were driven to even further extremes and then solidified
#
Also, I think Amit, what this reflects is the overarching growing trend of polarization
#
I mean, this is if despite social media being around, this was not the case pre 2014 to
#
this extent. And the growing trend of polarization is also polarized economists and the economists
#
who are vocal on social media. And I do read them occasionally when they're writing their
#
op-eds and giving speeches. It's absolutely obnoxious because they know, I'm hoping they
#
know that no economic theory logic argument would support what they're saying. But they
#
are saying what they're saying because they have certain other motives and positions and
#
rank in mind. And that that's the great disservice they are doing to the larger community of
#
economists. And we are all getting confused and conflated together as we all belong to
#
that one entity, which is not true.
#
One minority of spineless people. No, I remember. In fact, after demonetization, a diktat went
#
out to all the people under the pay that you got to defend it in public. So you had people
#
defending demonetization through columns or through TV soundbites in ways that you know
#
that this guy has written excellent books. This guy is smart. He knows this is not true.
#
I'll tell you what happened with me during demonetization. I was extremely vocal on TV
#
channels. I was getting invited by prominent TV channels. One of the TV channels itself
#
got suffered as a result, I think. So I was getting called in TV channels. I was writing
#
in the media because it was a complete shock to my system, the way I know of it. Forget
#
economics, the way I know the country to be, the way I know the people to be, the very
#
fact that nobody protested. I still can't fathom that. So I was very vocal about it.
#
But then lo and behold, after a couple of months, I was indirectly told that I am voicing
#
my opinion too much and it's coming out as too anti-establishment and I need to tone it
#
down. So imagine, I mean, I am as small and trivial in the larger scheme of things as
#
can be. If I am facing some backlash of this kind, what other more prominent people would
#
be facing if they wanted to speak up against demon? And since then, as I said, it's been
#
a slippery slope downhill because you just can't speak up against establishment. I mean,
#
I did a lot of work against the GDP data, the official GDP data. But then there's backlash
#
there as well. You just can't criticize anything that is wrong in the establishment, in the
#
polity, in the policy, in the economic space. And therefore, the economists who are getting
#
legitimacy, who are getting the front page, whatever columns, who are getting the social
#
media voice, are the ones who are towing the party line. So I think that is, we are sort
#
of getting relegated to the background. And maybe to some extent, we are at fault as well.
#
I mean, maybe we should grab social media. We should be as vocal as well. But that's
#
You know, but one thing, so my job, in fact, in the technical hat that I wear, it actually
#
involves being very behind the scenes because the World Bank typically will only support
#
Indian government programs, be it states, so on and so forth. And what's funny is that
#
even, so I completely agree with what, you know, I think both of you are saying on social
#
media and the public part of the economic discourse. But in the private part, because
#
I see the other part, even there, I see so much fear, confusion as well, because now
#
what's happened is, you know, I actually really do want to double down on that one handed
#
economist argument because everyone just seems to have 17 things to say, and you can't land
#
at one fact. So to, you know, for action, everyone must coalesce around a few facts.
#
And I've realized even in private conversations, and people just can't coalesce, that's number
#
one. And I see this particularly, I think the higher up you go in states, I actually
#
think there's still coalitions around facts. I noticed that as you start to deal with a
#
lot of national agencies, things do start to change. The other thing I noticed, which
#
is actually even something that makes me quite cautious and worried, is that even if there
#
is a coalition around facts, now there's a sense that, well, I mean, what will happen?
#
You know, they used to be the entrepreneurial bureaucrat, right? Earlier, we all know this
#
person who would sort of navigate the corridors of power, would push for things. What I increasingly
#
also noticed is that even that instinct, right, of being rewarded, it's really just, you know,
#
it's really changed. And I think if the private side of it also, where you're not really public
#
facing is like this, you know, where is the sort of push and the charge and the system
#
going to come from if it has to change equilibrium? So I guess I'm sounding now as pessimistic
#
as you, Amit, which is quite worrying. I'm optimistic on other parts, maybe outside the
#
government systems, but I fully agree. And I think the other issue where I do think that
#
there's a lot of enthusiasm though, is I see, for example, you know, there are these young
#
people often I notice who are very active on social media. I mean, I'm thinking of a
#
Rhodes scholar or these, you know, they're just putting out facts and they're calling
#
out nonsense. And it's actually quite wonderful to see. So I think while I fully agree with
#
I think what Rajeshwari is saying, I also think almost the antidote to that is probably
#
going to come from some of these more, the flatter platforms, right? Because even in
#
private, in government, I just don't see the, I don't see slack in the system. I think everyone
#
is either too cynical or perhaps too concerned about just what's the point and pushing for
#
action when nothing will happen. And I actually think it's going to be a lot of sort of younger
#
students who are perhaps now much more, you know, creating their own spaces, where I think
#
a lot of the real creative energies or like the push for change might come from.
#
So in fact, I'll say that on this point, I mean, something as fundamental as has the
#
economy recovered from the pandemic, right? It is at the top of all our minds, economists,
#
non-economists, everybody wants to know this, but there is no consensus on something that
#
should be based on data where all the data, majority of it should speak in the same direction.
#
I mean, if you think about the 2010 onward slowdown, at least by now there is a consensus
#
which many of us had to really struggle to establish a consensus that, you know, since
#
2010, the economy has indeed been slowing down. And it took us 10 years, Pooja wrote
#
an amazing book, Ajay Shah, Vijay Kalkar wrote the book, and it took us a long time to tell
#
people, yes, the economy was in doldrums, the economy was in a bad shape. Now, as we're
#
living through it, has the economy recovered from the pandemic or not? It should not be
#
a very difficult question to answer when you have access to multiple data series, much
#
more than we had in 60s and 70s, where the only data where we would look at is GDP. Today
#
you have a jar of series that you can look at and you can construct a story. What is
#
the factual story? What's the fact? But we can't seem to arrive at a consensus even on
#
that because there, the government agencies are spinning a completely different story.
#
Their version of the reality is that everything is going hunky-dory, we are back to where
#
we were, the recovery is going full on, and we are on track to become that whatever $5
#
billion, whatever the number is. But then when you look at the data, when you analyze
#
it as economists, you see that that is not the case. I mean, the economy is really struggling.
#
There are multiple pockets of worry and we can talk about it if we want to. But why is
#
there such lack of transparency on the behalf of the government agencies who are most responsible
#
for putting up the truth in front of the common people? So it's almost like you're putting
#
a facade in front of their eyes. You want to drink a different Kool-Aid and you want
#
to convince them with a different narrative. And therefore you're going to pursue a policy
#
also that is suitable to that when you've gotten the very basics of it wrong. And therefore
#
everything that follows after that is also wrong.
#
And can I just add, I mean, one of the biggest challenges is that we just don't even data.
#
I mean, we still don't, we don't know what our poverty rate is. We, you know, we were
#
talking about poverty and inequality. The NSS and MOSPE, which used to put out churn
#
out information, we just haven't had a consumption round. I don't even know what's happening
#
with the census, to be honest. I believe it was supposed to happen. Then now it's again,
#
there are questions. And some of these core institutions that were supposed to generate
#
basic facts around the world, of the world, we are just not seeing those being published.
#
And to me, honestly, I was on a panel recently discussing how to better feminize data. And
#
this wonderful economist I was on the panel with, she actually turned at the end, we were
#
talking and she said, you know, all these very exciting ideas of like making women's
#
voices more representative and data. That's all very nice. But right now we just need
#
the data. We just need any basic, even if it's masculine data, give us something. And
#
I think especially for those who work in the social sectors and so on, it's even more worrying
#
because you know, NFHS is not fully complete. There are questions about, you know, what
#
is the sampling rounds. And these are things actually that again, not rocket science. These
#
are things that, you know, these are institutions that are used to it. But to me, in fact, the
#
most fundamental, anyone asks me anything about what to do with the, about the economy,
#
not that lots of people ask me. But when people do ask me, the one thing I actually say is
#
just get, just some core fundamental data just needs to be published because we are
#
just right now flying blind. So I completely want to double down on what Rajeshwari said
#
along with publish the data.
#
There are a lot of questions here. And one is, of course, I've discussed data with every
#
economist on the show, including both of you in the different episodes we've done. And
#
we know why it's a problem. And I'll just be pessimistic and say that the fact that
#
so many government institutions, for example, are not forthcoming with data is not going
#
to change. And the answer for that is a classic economist answer of incentives, right? It's
#
not going to change. It is the way it is. So the two related questions I have are one,
#
how do you cope without it? What are the kind of proxies that you use? And the second one,
#
which is almost the same question, but slightly different, is that if someone listening to
#
the show or a citizen like me just wants to know, how do I know? How are things, right?
#
Because you have an informal sector which is not measured directly. You try to figure
#
out other ways of trying to come at how it's doing. We know it's been demolished by demonetization,
#
GST, COVID, all of these things coming together. So, you know, Shreena, you spoke about the
#
businessmen you're meeting who are running factories, so they think everything is fine.
#
They're seeing one part of the elephant. You might see another part of the elephant. Rajeshwari
#
might see another part of the elephant. Given my current girth, all of you are looking at
#
me. So, you know, I got to, I'll take a digress. We were not, because you're speaking, we were
#
looking at you. Okay, Aamir, we know what he's sensitive about now. So, I'll tell you a joke
#
over here. I read this lovely tweet by someone I've forgotten who I'll try and find it and
#
link it. But the tweet basically is something to the effect of, I fell into the river and
#
I drowned. And when they pulled my body up, the person who pulled it up and said, look,
#
it's so bloated and grotesque. And the person next to him said, oh, he fell in just a minute
#
ago. So yeah, so that's my self-deprecating joke. I think after the economy, we need to
#
talk about self-love. You're going to regain us with gossip after this session. Other bogus
#
terms. I just have one thing to offer on data. There are lots of issues with CMI, but I am
#
so grateful that CMI exists. Let's take a minute to just, you know, celebrate that.
#
Because had it not been for that, at least in our work, my day-to-day work, we've partnered
#
with CMI. The World Bank now actually finances some core modules around social protection,
#
safety nets, some questions on health. We are using all of that to just understand what's
#
happening at least in our area of work. So I'm very grateful. And yes, I know that there
#
are challenges and those are things that can be tested, expanded, so on and so forth. That's
#
very helpful. And I think for anyone, at least in my domain, anyone interested in trying
#
to understand what's happening to welfare, what's happening to social policy, I find
#
in particular Azim Premji University keeps now almost an aggregated database. And one,
#
they come out with this fabulous report, which I think everyone should see. It's the state
#
of what is happening to the labor market. They produce it now every year, which is just
#
wonderful. And they use a combination of data sources. I find that very useful. And the
#
second is they actually now aggregate information and they keep it. So for anyone who wants
#
to know what's happening from very different organizations, I find that that now is often
#
almost the beginning point, and then you can sort of follow through. So I think I had those
#
two. But I do want to say that even with all of this, we've had government data forever
#
and ever, and there have always been incentives to hide that data, but it was published. And
#
it is really a shame that that is not happening anymore.
#
So I have a few points to add. One is that I completely agree with Shayan, and what you
#
said is that the one serious damage that has happened over the last decade or so is that
#
the trust in data is gone. And once again, when we say data here, people are not making
#
the distinction between official, private, government. To them, the trust in data is
#
gone. And so if you're quoting some numbers and telling me this is what is happening,
#
how do I even know that I can trust those numbers? And it's like at the core and heart
#
of economics as a social science, you can't even trust the numbers. What are you going
#
to talk about analyzing the numbers and coming up with interpretations? And this, I completely
#
agree what Shayan also said is that earlier the situation, I mean, we've always had state
#
capacity problems, even in data collection and data generation, but it was never as dire
#
as it is today because we never had a situation of suppression of official data. And the moment
#
the government starts suppressing data, you obviously start feeling very alerted that
#
what exactly is going on in the economy? How bad is the situation that the government feels
#
the need to suppress something as big as a consumption survey results? And what has happened
#
over the last five, six years is that despite repeated criticisms, writing, we have all
#
talked about it in public forums, written about it and research on it, be the GDP data,
#
be the consumption data, employment, unemployment survey, there has been no addressing from
#
the side of the government. There has been no acknowledgement that is there is a problem
#
and we're looking into it. Or there has been no steps taken by the statistical organization
#
of the country that, okay, yes, we are going to do ABC in order to address some of these
#
problems. And because it has been a one-sided criticism, we are lamenting and we are complaining
#
and we are criticizing with nothing coming from the other side. I think at some point
#
people just give up and say, fine, we can't just use the official data anymore. But what
#
I feel a little bit sad about is that we know that the GDP data, for example, has problems,
#
but we still continue to look at the GDP data to understand how the economy is doing, right?
#
Because the NSO, et cetera, have not taken any steps to address the problems. People
#
have sort of forgotten about it, right? It's like the memory is very short-lived and now
#
we have normalized the problems and we have internalized it and we are going forward with
#
it, which is quite problematic because that legitimizes all the problems that exist in
#
the series still. For example, when I tell my students to do research, I explicitly tell
#
them you can't use GDP as a continuous time series for 50 years, there is a break in between.
#
But how many people are really going to be doing that? So therefore, the conclusions
#
that you're getting could be erroneous at different levels, but that is just one official
#
series. On multiple other series, what happens is when you can't trust one big official data,
#
as I said, that gets influenced into all the other series, which number can you trust,
#
which you cannot. I, for example, have a hard time trusting any official data and which
#
is very bad for a macro economist because for macro, you have to use official data.
#
So what I end up doing is I have started looking a lot to micro data and micro data coming
#
from private sources. Of course, one huge source of data is center for monitoring in
#
an economy. The CMI has done massive public service by collecting all the data at a firm
#
level, at the household's level. The only problem is it's not going to be accessible
#
to the common person because it is expensive. It's subscription-based. You can't subscribe
#
to a CMI data just like that. So I think there, probably the responsibility lies with economists
#
like us who can access the data to make it accessible to the common person in whichever
#
form and shape we can. So I think looking at micro data is the way to go. You can't
#
look at macro official level data anymore and look at a large number of disaggregated
#
series. So for example, I would look at two wheeler sales. I would look at auto sales.
#
All of these data coming from, so even if they're coming from different ministries
#
and different departments, at least there I have the hope that not everything at a disaggregated
#
level is messed up. So you look at a bunch of disaggregated series and you try to piece
#
a story together and you sort of back it up using micro level data from private sources.
#
I think the way to go for India increasingly is private data. I think we have to move away
#
from this official monopoly over data because we have seen the risks and the dangers associated
#
with that and the lack of accountability and lack of credibility and transparency. So I
#
think at some point of time, we have to realize that there has to be a lot of private sector
#
involvement in data, data collection, data generation, data dissemination in whichever
#
form and shape it can be because at least there is a little bit more accountability
#
there because they are responsible to their shareholders or to whoever the stakeholders
#
are. So they're hopefully not going to be as sort of ignorant about or careless about
#
all of these problems. So I definitely think that private sector data and to the extent
#
possible primary level data collection, I think secondary data, the moment is collected
#
by government agencies, runs into all these problems. So surveys conducted by private
#
organizations like CMI, if you get funding, conducting own surveys to get, I mean, I'm
#
talking about researchers at this point of time, right? Primary level data. And that's
#
real tragic because it takes up a lot of time, effort, energy to even put the data together
#
and we're far away from even reaching the state where you can analyze the data and say
#
something about the economy. So to answer the question on Twitter, I honestly don't
#
have a good answer to that. I mean, what do I say, for example, to my mother who just
#
asks me, okay, what number do I look at to understand, you know, is the future for the
#
next five years going to be good or bad or how is the economy doing after the pandemic?
#
I don't know what to say to her. I mean, am I going to sit and explain to her or look
#
at ABC series? Of course not. So I think it's a feeling, by the way, not just in India.
#
I think it's happening all over the world. All over the world there is problem with data.
#
I was in Paris 2019 before the lockdown happened and there was a big OECD level data conference
#
and the main title of the conference was trust in official statistics. So it's a problem
#
that's happening in EMs and developing countries all over the world. I mean, we have always
#
known China has data problems and now we have woken up to the reality that all EMs have
#
data problems. So I think private sector collecting data, primary level survey, primary level
#
data collection, that's the way to go. I mean, we have to increasingly move away from government
#
data sources. Although, and I think the challenge here is
#
going to be, I support that. The problem is, I think we're in this very odd catch 22 when
#
it comes to data. So if you have government data, then you know there are problems with
#
it. But if you use, for example, see, we know what happens when, you know, I write sometimes
#
reports for the government, immediately there will be questions about, well, what about
#
this source? It's incomplete. So nothing because it's not even like the good is becoming the
#
enemy of the perfect here. It's almost like half the data is becoming the enemy of the
#
other half. And what does that mean? It's a zero sum game. In the end, there's like nothing
#
that you can trust. And we seem to now just be stuck in this. And, you know, I think what
#
is a very helpful, hopeful example of maybe the solution out is take us, sir, for example,
#
they went out and constructed their own metrics of education. They did not rely on any government.
#
They didn't recreate a government survey. They just said we want to do something on
#
our own. They went out and they have a machinery which is very well financed, supported, motivated
#
because they are focused on a cause. And they cover and measure this data. And I think it
#
has actually now led to, although the government does dispute, right? They say we have our
#
own learning measures. But at the end of the day, that tussle has led to something that
#
is actually more inspired to improving. It is actually now a better equilibrium of how
#
we understand learning data to be. I think that kind of work now has to slowly start
#
to happen. I don't think it can happen in everything because I don't think the private
#
sector has the resources to even manage. I mean, then the real question is what is our
#
large statistical machinery also supposed to be doing, right? Either you say, well,
#
you want to just dismantle it or you focus on collecting GDP data better and figure out
#
why there are all these inconsistencies. I think the real question has to be a few areas.
#
For example, consumption to me is one of the core areas because you can't say anything
#
about the economy without knowing what's happening to household consumption. And right now that's
#
still very much up in the air. So I think I would actually be very narrow. I would say,
#
take a few measures which really do then help build up and do have links to all kinds of
#
policy domains. Consumption to me is one of them, more than perhaps even income, because
#
I've realized income is so noisy, you're never going to... This is just for anyone listening.
#
I think all of us know this, but it's important to say, don't believe household income estimates
#
when people are just average on reporting them because it's just the noisiest, dirtiest
#
measure, right? But consumption, on the other hand, particularly if you collect it in a
#
certain way, that to me is where I agree. I think the private sector has to come in
#
given that right now the public sector is not taking care of that knowledge good. So
#
I think I just double down, but I'd be very narrow and I'd say, look at the ASAR example
#
as almost a pathway out of this bad equilibrium we're in and perhaps try and recreate that
#
around consumption, right? And I'm honestly, the sense I have is it's probably going to
#
be organizations like CMI who will have to sort of improve the measure, improve the sample,
#
all these engage with the feedback that they're getting from different quarters and try and
#
see how can we make it more accessible that consumption data is just more easily accessible,
#
it's rigorous and it's standardized while we keep waiting for the next NSS consumption
#
round to come out. And I don't know when that will be.
#
So I think we definitely need more CMI's in the sense that CMI itself took a very long
#
time to be legitimate. And today, for example, we don't talk about the unemployment data
#
coming out from the government. We talk about the labor force participation rate, which
#
is almost exclusively a CMI construct. Before CMI came up with the women labor force participation
#
rate of less than 10%, nobody was worried about women unemployment, right? Because we
#
just could not measure it. So I think it takes time. I think CMI took almost 20, 30 years,
#
but they have found the legitimacy. And today, the vast sections of researchers and everybody,
#
they are practitioners, everybody's using CMI data to understand some parts of the economy.
#
And there I think the big value addition they have done is they have one other than looking
#
at households data, which is very important. They've also been looking for the longest
#
of time at firm level data. And firm level data gives you a lot of picture about what's
#
happening in the economy because ultimately the firms that are producing GDP. So who are
#
the firms borrowing from? How many are they employing? I mean, what is the kind of output
#
they're producing? That gives you that micro level picture, which you can then use to get
#
a sense of what's happening in the economy. So I think we definitely need more CMI's and
#
they have figured out the resourcing as well because they're sort of selling the data as
#
a good, as an output that they're producing. And that is something that just has to happen
#
more as are completely, I agree with that. And I think the need for the government statistical
#
organization or the government machinery apparatus is, for example, to do something like census,
#
like nobody other than the government can do a census or even to calculate GDP. I mean,
#
GDP has a kind of official legitimacy across countries of the world that no other indicator
#
can ever match up to with all its shortcomings. So to that extent, I think they will be there
#
and they will be used by government agencies themselves. But there has to be this parallel
#
data movement spearheaded by organizations like SR and CMIE so that we don't get sort
#
of blindsided by suppression of reports and problematic data.
#
Can I just, you know, one thing, and this is actually, this is actually what makes me
#
really sad about what's happened to the statistical architecture of India, because actually there's
#
a very, what was the original statistical architecture of India in Rajeshwari's life?
#
It was a boys club of like Bengali and some Malayali men.
#
Yeah, exactly. And you know, it was-
#
Exactly. Yeah. And what's actually really interesting and it's something I've been like following
#
now, maybe something I'll do in the future is that actually it is an architecture that
#
became much more feminized, much more inclusive. Our premier now data journalists, so many
#
really good data scientists are women. There was a lot of work. There was something called
#
the Delhi Group that used to sit together with the NSS. There were people like Ranana
#
Jhabwala and so many people involved in trying to make sure that women's work unpaid, you
#
know, all of that was measured by the formal government machinery. And that really fed
#
into this big crisis now that we discuss around labor force issues. So it's not like this
#
was not an architecture that was not open to change, reform, absorbing. It was actually
#
a very progressive, it was moving in that direction. And then now we're in this place
#
where Rajeshwari and I are saying things like, well, we need to look at, you know, someone
#
else to collect consumption and you just do the census. It actually, I mean, it is depressing.
#
But again, because I want to sort of end on, I want to focus on hope as opposed to depression,
#
we still do have agencies that are collecting this data. They are attacked left, right center,
#
but they're, they're dealing with it. And CMI is one of them. And you also have organizations
#
during the COVID pandemic, it was, you know, Swann put out an entire report on what was
#
happening to migrant workers. There are all kinds of organizations who are producing now
#
data. I think now it's going to perhaps be required of donor organizations or development
#
agencies or these organizations to think about how do we standardize some of these modes
#
of collection, because there is going to be a lot of data collection that's going to happen
#
now outside and won't even be technically survey agencies or, you know, the private
#
vendor, it'll be other organizations and some standardization in that would also be good.
#
By the way, one thing I want to add to be fair is that there are some government data,
#
which are definitely better than the rest. So for example, when we look at inflation
#
and we have looked carefully at the CPI inflation measurement, et cetera, that is definitely
#
at par with what's done with the Western countries. And there is very little room for doubting
#
that data per se. So there are some cities where the statistical organization is still
#
doing a very good job, but at the same time, there are other cities like consumption, unemployment,
#
GDP, whether a problem. So I think the problem there is a common person wouldn't know how
#
do you distinguish between a bad GDP and a good inflation data, right? So for example,
#
in the U.S., they came up with this amazing project called One Billion Prices, where you
#
are basically collecting data on retail prices from the websites like Amazon, et cetera,
#
and all the online retail websites that there are. And every day you're basically sitting
#
by an algorithm where the computer is going and scraping data from all the websites on
#
a daily basis, an hourly basis. And you'll get really high frequency price level data
#
from the online retail. In the U.S., of course, it's even better because there's a large presence
#
of online retail. To the extent in India, we have a big basket and Amazon, a flip cut.
#
It's even possible to do in India. And I know that there are economists who have done that.
#
So I think all of these efforts, you may not end up using it for anything, but it makes
#
it that much harder for government agencies to sort of, I don't want to use the word fool
#
you, but it makes it that much harder for the government agencies to hide what the actual
#
truth is, because you just have many cities out there. And together, somebody will question
#
them. They don't know why that number is looking like this and why it's yours like that. And
#
there is definitely some benefit to that.
#
So a final sort of question before we go into the break. By final, I don't mean final, final.
#
Abhi toh asham baaki hai. But which is this, that, you know, earlier we spoke about how
#
there's been a sort of continuity in terms of economic ideology across governments. They're
#
all statist and distrust markets and so on and so forth. There's also been a good kind
#
of continuity that has been there at parts within the policy establishment, in the same
#
sense that Ajay spoke about that ecosystem building up in the late 80s. So in 91, when
#
the reforms happened, you had that, you know, carder of people who could carry that shit
#
out. Similarly, you know, in under Vajpayee's government, they were always talking to the
#
opposition. When that transition happened in 2014 for a while, as Pooja writes in a
#
book, The Lost Record, you know, you had Chidambaram's people kind of continuing with Jaitley's
#
people. And there was a continuity there till a few months into, you know, the regime, as
#
it were. Everything went to hell. So now the question is a dual one. One is what is, you
#
know, in terms of continuity, in terms of that sense that we are all working to solve
#
the same problem, has something broken down drastically and therefore is this degradation
#
of all of these institutions which give us data, is that degradation, you know, willful
#
malice? Or is it just incompetence and perhaps the next time around it can get, you know,
#
there is hope that we might get back on the path of progress.
#
So I'll say two things. The statistical machinery, and this is, by the way, true of the Indian
#
bureaucracy. I mean, this is, I think, the way the bureaucracy is architected. You have,
#
you know what, I wouldn't even use, call it the flailing state, but essentially the idea
#
that you have people who are technical minds up top, who have always been very bright dynamic.
#
But even with the statistical machinery, prior to this particular phase, there were lots
#
of issues about recruitment, training, management of the local levels of data collection management.
#
So I almost feel that it was a system which was ready for a crisis because there were
#
signs of all of this already coming out. And I have sympathy for those in, for example,
#
Mosby who say that there's a reason why, also technical reasons why, to do with staff, to
#
do with design, to do with all kinds of questions, that some of the data is not, so I have sympathy
#
for that. I have no patience for it, but I have sympathy for it. You know, I think those
#
are two different things.
#
It's almost like you're talking about your children or something. If you were to have
#
them, I have patience. Sympathy, but not patience. I do, I do. I actually, I don't know. I really,
#
you know this, I mentioned this in my book. I have a lot of, I think I've grown up around
#
statisticians when I was very young. They are in my life. And I think there is a lot
#
of, I know it's a very tough job and being a surveyor is probably one of the toughest
#
jobs in this country to collect any illicit responses from people. And you know this Amit.
#
And so I think for me, yes, maybe, maybe not children, like that's a bit pedantic.
#
I find it damn easy actually. Yeah, you find it very easy, I'm sure. Maybe we should put
#
you in a statistical organisation. Yeah, but you need a million of me. Yes, exactly. Which
#
would be difficult. We'll clone you. Also, I have a feeling he'll just go off in some
#
other tangent and then, you know, yeah, this is the thing. Tell me about your childhood.
#
Yes, let's talk about your story as opposed to the sugar that you consumed in the last
#
week. But anyway, I almost feel like, you know, in this kind of context, it was ready
#
for a crisis. Then there has been, obviously, there are politics now to clearly data and
#
I think Rajeshwari was alluding to this. I think the two have just now concocted and
#
created this complete storm, right? Where now there's like silence. I mean, there's
#
barely any data coming out. I also think part of it is something we were discussing earlier,
#
which is that I think the level of scrutiny on the health of any metric, because of social
#
media, because we are now there is a kind of polity, which is far more interested in
#
scrutinising lots of things, debating for good or for bad. As a consequence, there's
#
also a lot of fear around, well, what if we put things out which are just, you know, not
#
their issues, which I have a feeling maybe in the past, you could sort of test and experiment
#
and learn. And there were measures, by the way, for example, when they were trying to
#
measure women's informal work, there were some measures that just did not work at all.
#
I have a feeling maybe if that happened now, there would be such a set of storm and stories
#
around it. And given that politics now is so closely linked to the news cycle and how
#
you're represented and image and all of that, I think that's also making it worse. Having
#
said that, though, I do still think that in state governments, planning departments, which
#
take the ownership particularly of collecting local data, I think they are still very committed
#
to the idea of at least collecting information because they have to put it in their state
#
plans, their state budgets. And I think a lot of the data story, Amit, is also related
#
to the planning story because when the Planning Commission went and was replaced with what
#
is the NITI Aayog now, a lot of the fundamental where the data was going, right, and some
#
of the decision making, which was almost binding because you had to, there were budget allocations
#
that were done on it. There were poverty estimations that were being done. When all of that went,
#
some of the push in the system, the almost, you know, like how in India, everything happens
#
in mission mode, that mission mode in the system evaporated. So I have a feeling part
#
of it is also then the incentives in the system to get certain things done also started to
#
recede. So I think it's a combination of three, but I wouldn't just put it on malice. I think
#
there is also, there are genuine questions about bureaucratic reform, not just, I mean,
#
definitely in the statistical architecture, but I think this is larger parts of the bureaucracy.
#
Others on your show have talked about this. And I think that meets malice and then you
#
have the outcome that you do.
#
So I largely agree with what Shreana said. I think the answer is not as straightforward
#
as saying it's either malice or incompetence, right? Because for example, if you just look
#
at the GDP data, it's an extremely complicated task to collect data and compute the GDP of
#
a country. And we are talking about the largest democracy of the world. GDP collection process
#
in India is a complete nightmare. And you have to remember that India was at the frontier
#
of statistical data collection back in the sixties and seventies during the Mahalanobis
#
period, et cetera. And we were actually, I mean, our advice, the advice of our statisticians
#
was sought by the Western countries in order to build a statistical structure and system.
#
So we were at that level. So we did something right. I mean, we definitely got that edifice
#
that is statistical structure right. But I think what happened down the line is, and
#
I agree completely with what Shreana said here, is that we also needed to continuously
#
reform the statistical bureaucracy. As we were reforming the country, as we were opening
#
up the country, which became vastly more complex than the centrally planned closed economy
#
of the sixties and seventies, we suddenly have a very complex modern market economy
#
with the status edifice imposed on top of it. But we've somewhere down the line forgot
#
to reform the statistical bureaucracy. We forgot to improve their capacity, strengthen
#
their capacity with numbers, skill quality, everything. So you have the same system that
#
continued from the sixties and seventies, but you're now putting the pressure of computing
#
the GDP of a significantly more complex economy. And you have the pressure of meeting international
#
standards. In fact, the latest revision of GDP was done primarily to take India's GDP
#
method to the international standards. You have that pressure as well. And there is increased
#
scrutiny exactly as Shreana said, because now suddenly it's not just 10 statisticians
#
sitting in ISAC, Alcatel have access to the data. There is everybody who has access to
#
the data and everybody can ask questions about the data. So I think that the combination
#
of that led to the crumbling of that edifice, so to speak. And then somewhere down the line,
#
you realize that you are in a secular stagnation for 10 years. You were just not aware of it
#
because you were looking at some other numbers or you just chose to be oblivious about it.
#
And then suddenly a survey comes out, which shows that consumption is like four decades
#
low, unemployment is four decades high. What do you do about it? You suddenly, you don't
#
have a coherent economic strategy. You don't have an economic policy or election is down
#
the road. What do you do with it? So I wouldn't put it in malice. It's almost like a political
#
compulsion. Don't release the survey because then we are going to look really bad. So I
#
think it's a combination of everything. But the problem is that they probably could have
#
addressed it by being a little bit more transparent and being a bit more proactive about taking
#
steps to address the problem, which they did not do. And we kept waiting for when it's
#
the next consumption survey is going to happen. When are they going to fix the GDP problems?
#
They just did not do it. So the silence on the part of the statistical organization is
#
what I think compounded the problem even more because by now it's been 2015 was when GDP
#
data was released. 2017 was when the service was suppressed. We are in 2022 and we have
#
not seen any steps being taken by them. Can I just add just two quick things? I mean,
#
the reason the last PLFS was released was because essentially the statisticians went
#
on strike. And I agree with Rajeshwari that we need to see more of this Hartaal culture
#
perhaps in our statistical bureaucracy. Something that the bongs got right.
#
Yeah, exactly. And the second thing I want to actually say is, you know, what is actually
#
a very exciting source of new data now is transaction data, all kinds of data. We're
#
all always exchanging data every day. Problem is we don't have a data privacy law yet. It's
#
been debated till Adam in parliament. I believe it's now again gone back and there's again
#
JPC looking at it. If you don't even have a data privacy framework, then a lot of the
#
other exciting parts of the data while we're waiting for government data to organize itself,
#
even that you can't use one for, forget service delivery. For example, I'll give you one example,
#
you know, we're talking about welfare, right? One of the things everybody says countries
#
like Brazil have done is you have a unified registry, right? Where you say that, well,
#
one household receives four benefits and I know, you know, what these benefits are. In
#
India, number one, you can't even do that currently at the state or national level because
#
you can't, there is no legal framework to protect the data and the movement of data.
#
You would think this is something that is absolutely fundamental. So one, not just for
#
the delivery of basic goods and services, but also to understand what's happening to
#
transactions and going back to what Rajeshwari was saying about the micro constituents of
#
macro variables. You could do a lot of exciting stuff, but where is the data privacy framework?
#
So I just want to double down on what she said, but also say, I think there are alternative
#
sources of data available, but the use of them are very gray and nebulous because until
#
we have laws in place, we aren't also able to carefully use them.
#
By the way, one data that I would definitely look forward to using going forward would
#
be GST data because goods and services tax can be a very good alternative proxy to GDP
#
or overall aggregate indicated to understanding how the economy is doing. And the more the
#
government releases it in a more transparent manner, more disaggregated manner, the better.
#
So I would hope seriously that that continues and more disaggregated data comes out because
#
that is something that we can look at as an alternative proxy.
#
In fact, one of the questions that came in on Twitter was from Sahil Khandwala who said
#
quote, GST receipts crossed 140 crores in March 22. Does this mean GST is finally successfully
#
implemented? Has it has a net positive effect on the economy?
#
I don't think it says much about the implementation of GST as much as it does about normalization
#
of the economy after the pandemic. So you're basically seeing opening up of economic activity
#
or just seeing shutdowns and lockdowns are gone. The economy is back to sort of doing
#
the activities that it's supposed to be doing. And therefore, there's a revival of pent
#
up demand. All of that is happening and that's showing up in the GST data. I mean, it's difficult
#
to disentangle the two, but I don't think it has got so much to do with implementation
#
Can I just add one thing? I hear a lot of people say to me, well, look at the GST numbers.
#
They're just, it's all so great. And I can see both of you are just giggling at this
#
because all of us have heard it. One thing I will say to anyone, particularly young people
#
listening to us, if you lead the GST numbers, great, exactly as Rajeshwari said, look also
#
at the employment, unemployment that's coming out of CMI. I would almost force everyone.
#
It's a, it's a, it's a practice. It should be good practice that once you look at GST,
#
also look at the labor market, because I think you have to look at the two of them in conjunction
#
to understand what's happening because they do kind of, sometimes they give you a different
#
picture, but I think it's useful just so that we don't get carried away sometimes with this,
#
you know, the numbers that are being reported.
#
And I'm also skeptical of any kind of tax collections going up because taxes to me are
#
a transfer from the productive part of the economy to the parasitic part of the economy.
#
And on that note, we shall take a quick break.
#
I don't think we can say the same about indirect taxes or sort of, you know, GST, but anyways,
#
that's a different debate altogether. But I do agree that we have to look at multiple
#
cities. I think that's very clear by now. You can't put all your eggs in one basket
#
and say just one series and we know how the economy is doing.
#
And I have to tell you, I loved Shreyana's phrase just now when she spoke about how excited
#
she is by micro constituents of macro variables. That's, you know, such a superb geekery.
#
Thank you, Amit. This is what you elicit in us.
#
On that note, we'll take a break and when we come back, we'll go much deeper into our
#
Long before I was a podcaster, I was a writer. In fact, chances are that many of you first
#
heard of me because of my blog India Uncut, which was active between 2003 and 2009 and
#
became somewhat popular at the time. I love the freedom the form gave me and I feel I
#
was shaped by it in many ways. I exercise my writing muscle every day and was forced
#
to think about many different things because I wrote about many different things. Well,
#
that phase in my life ended for various reasons and now it is time to revive it. Only now
#
I'm doing it through a newsletter. I have started the India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com
#
where I will write regularly about whatever catches my fancy. I'll write about some of
#
the themes I cover in this podcast and about much else. So please do head on over to indiancut.substack.com
#
and subscribe. It is free. Once you sign up, each new installment that I write will land
#
up in your email inbox. You don't need to go anywhere. So subscribe now for free. The
#
India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com. Thank you. Welcome back to The Scene in the
#
Unseen. I'm chatting with Rajeshwari and Shreyaana and I had announced at the start of this episode
#
that we're going to talk about Rajeshwari's life and so on and so forth. And well, niyat
#
toh achi thi as Modiji says, but the situation we are in is that we have like an hour of
#
talking left and there are many things about the economy to discuss and Rajeshwari has
#
promised to come back at some point in time for a five or six hour episode where we can
#
go into deep detail into her life, you know, which is fascinating because her family has
#
a rich cultural history. Her ancestors, in fact, held the first Durga puja in a particular
#
First big Durga puja in the city to celebrate Robert Clive's victory in the Battle of Plassey.
#
Yeah, so patriots of existing regimes from a long time. I'm so religious about talking
#
I think maybe this is a good tactical move.
#
No, no, I really, I don't want to rush through this because I think that Rajeshwari's had
#
a really interesting life and it'll be great fun. So we shall save that for later. But
#
meanwhile, both of you mentioned that you had kind of questions for each other. So why
#
don't we go with that and then we can go on to whatever, you know, we'll take some stuff
#
from Twitter and perhaps things will occur to me as well.
#
Sure. So I had a question for Shreya now. I was listening to the podcast, which I thoroughly
#
loved. And I told you on the email as well that I really like the way you combine the
#
Bollywood pop culture with economics and labor market outcomes, which I mean, I would have
#
never even thought about. So the question that I had, I guess, was that the way you
#
are sort of, you know, the way Shah Rukh Khan enters into the book is basically the fact
#
that he's sort of more, much more of a feminist actor compared to the other actors of his
#
generation. Not feminist in the sense that he's much more caring and his views towards
#
women and the way he deals with women is very different from the way-
#
In parts of his iconography.
#
Parts of his iconography is different from the way the other big actors of his time would
#
deal with. And that is what makes women relate to him a lot more, I guess, than or rather
#
become his fans much more than others. So basically, you know, I mean, he comes across
#
as much more of a person that women feel comfortable with or women feel that they want that kind
#
of a boyfriend or a husband who's going to be giving importance to them, et cetera, et
#
cetera. So I guess that the doubt that I had, which is just pure doubt, just as I was listening
#
to the podcast is that-
#
Because you're not an Aamir fan.
#
Is that, no, I'm not a fan of anyone in Bollywood per se, but basically, I think the question
#
that I had was that, isn't it fair to say that while Shah Rukh, I mean, the way he was
#
in most of the portrayal of the roles that he did in the movies, at the same time, all
#
the women actresses in his movies, they didn't really have a lot to do per se. And now hear
#
me out when I let me finish this. So what I'm trying to say is that even if you take
#
a classic movie like DDLJ, right, where it's true, I mean, the boy falls in love with girl
#
and it's all very romantic and it's all very nice and is dealing with Simran is also very
#
nice and caring and loving and sweet and all of that. But ultimately, he's the one who
#
does the entire job of convincing Simran's parents. He's the one who goes all the way
#
to India. He's the one who's doing all the courting and convincing and all of that. And
#
while the girl is just sitting demurely waiting for him to be done with whatever he's doing
#
so that they can get together. So she doesn't really have a whole lot of things to do in
#
the second half of the movie. And likewise, for example, if I think of either, you know,
#
Kal Ho Na Ho or all the other movies of that particular time period, Kabhi Kushi Kabhi
#
Gham, Kuch Kuch Hota Etc. The women don't really have a lot to do. I mean, I'm not talking
#
about women having agency, but I'm just saying that other than romancing or other than, you
#
know, the romantic complications that entail in the movies, there's not a whole lot that
#
the women are actually doing in terms of, you know, do they have jobs? What is their viewpoints?
#
What is their choice across different men? Are they even exercising a choice? What agency
#
do they have? Etc. And if I contrast that, and maybe this was reflective of the way society
#
was back then that we were liberalizing, but we still had a lot of hangover of the past
#
of tradition, women not really playing a very powerful role in society and family, etc.
#
And if I contrast that to now, for example, I mean, some of the movies that I have seen,
#
let's say Vicky Kaushal comes to mind. I'm not talking about the person as, you know,
#
whether I'm a fan or not, but I'm just saying the roles that he essays. So for example,
#
you have a movie like Manmar Zia where there is a woman who has a choice between two men
#
and she exercises the choice to go with one and not the other. Or for example, there is
#
love per square foot where the girl and the boy decide to get married because each of
#
them wants to own a home. Whereas love and romance is not the reason for the marriage.
#
The girl has as much agency as the boy does. Or for example, even Alia Bhatt movies, like
#
for example, a highway where she chooses to stay with the abductor because she doesn't
#
want to go back home. And then when the abductor is killed, she just abandons her own family
#
and goes to the mountains and does her own business and builds a home, which is tremendous
#
amount of energy agency on part of a young girl. Again, other examples. So I guess, you
#
know, Priyanka Chopra in Dil Dharakne Do, this movie that I have seen recently, where
#
she gets a divorce and she manages the father's business, which is again, tremendous amount
#
of agency on part of a woman. And in fact, the brother, which is Ranveer Singh, is being
#
portrayed as a good for nothing. So I think that's just a marked departure, even Yeh
#
Jawani Hai Diwani. I mean, Ranveer Kapoor being a very lovey dovey boy, but then Deepika
#
Padukone in that movie has a job. I mean, she's a medical student who's very good in
#
her studies. We don't ever see her working. At least she has a role, which is basically
#
she has a role in a clinic. No, they all have jobs. Which is compared to all the other women
#
we've seen in the Shah Rukh Khan movies, but they're not doing anything much. No, but now
#
I will protest. Actually, factually, that's incorrect because Preeti Zinta, how does she
#
meet Saif Ali Khan in Kal Ho Na Ho? It's because she's studying to be a management student.
#
Each one of the women, Simran is probably actually the only one. And in fact, that's
#
part of the big reason why a lot of the women who I interviewed said to me that, well,
#
Simran can't live on her own, so he better make sure that Simran's father supports
#
the match. So actually that's not true because if you look at a lot of his films, Swades,
#
the teacher, her teaching is very prominent and important in fact. And watch Swades to know that
#
is not a woman who has no agency. So look at Swades Kal Ho Na Ho as well, because remember,
#
is actually she has a choice between Saif and Shah Rukh. She realizes Shah Rukh is not
#
interested because he's married. She's going to marry Saif. There's a lot going on. Veer Zara
#
as well. The reason she goes to India is because she wants to. Fine, but you won't agree that the
#
recent, there has been definitely a transition. I'll come to that in a second. So I think so
#
that's one. So I think we should just retire the idea that the women don't have agency or don't
#
have jobs because that's just statistically actually not true because in these movies,
#
his last film Zero is a remarkable film because it has a scientist or an actress who he is besotted
#
with, both of whom, and they both just reject him. And Amit and I were joking, in fact, during the
#
last podcast and the rejection is literally made, is made literal by the fact that he is
#
vertically challenged or suffers from dwarfism. And they say, you don't measure up to me, right?
#
So I think that's one. So I don't think that that's true. And I also think agency is not just,
#
there's a kind of flatness to the visual medium. Agency is not just us having one dialogue saying,
#
oh, the girl has a job. For example, Deepika Padukone in that Yeh Jawani, she is doing nothing
#
but basically, in actually all of Ranbir Kapoor's films, the women do nothing but essentially be
#
the supportive savior or the manic pixie dream girl. And they all at some point have a job,
#
like there's a, you know, there'll be someone doing something, but you never actually,
#
their jobs don't necessarily intersect with the storyline per se. I think where things are
#
actually very different is when women write films. So take Dear Zindagi, where actually
#
the principal conflict is Shah Rukh is playing a therapist to Alia Bhatt trying to figure out what
#
to do with her career and her personal life. She's very unhappy with the way her career is going.
#
And it is upfront center in that movie. And he in fact plays almost, he's like the supporting
#
character to a film that is about her conflicts, right? So I think, I think just to say, I think
#
actually the real axis of shift, I don't think is in just the, whether we have one dialogue or two
#
dialogues where they go to office or they show her, how much of a woman's ambition to run an NGO,
#
to run a magazine. So Preeti Zinta runs a magazine, by the way, in Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna,
#
the wife's career is actually the principal fault line in that Shah Rukh film because he is unable
#
to handle her success. So again, going back to that idea that women in his films definitely have
#
career paths. And I think, you know, it's just, just because, but even with that, I don't particularly
#
think it's a great portrayal of women. So I would never say that the women are portrayed like it
#
lavishingly well. I just feel that now increasingly women are relatively speaking definitely portrayed
#
better than what it was back then. So, you know, I actually, here's the thing, and Paramita Vohra
#
actually recently did a piece about this and I completely agree with her. You know, I had done
#
this thing where I measure how much women speak in film and someone in a newspaper had reported on
#
this and they had interviewed Paramita. And one of the things she actually said, and I think it
#
really stayed with me is that she felt that visual mediums have become very gendered of late, right?
#
And what that basically means is that there's this constant need to show that the woman is being
#
portrayed well, because there is this scrutinizing gaze going back to what we were talking about,
#
but it's almost like the ways you're fighting stereotypes are so stereotypical.
#
I don't think in fact, other than a wonderful OTT show, which is about a Delhi police officer,
#
I'm forgetting the name of the show. Well, there's that, but there's another one as well.
#
I'm yet to see all luck by chance actually is one of the best films, I think to me, when it
#
comes to women's agency job, all of that, right? But you wouldn't agree that there are increasingly
#
more women centric scripts being written in Bollywood. I think they're very formulaic.
#
I think they're actually really boring. To be honest, I see some of the stuff and it's almost
#
like you want to show a woman is empowered. So there's some kind of like prototypical way
#
a woman is empowered. And I'm not sure. I don't buy into it. I don't feel the conflicts. For example,
#
if you think of a Razi, right? I mean, yes, it's based on true story, but then it was not
#
typical at all. But see, this is where I go back to... Or a highway for that matter.
#
No, but here's the thing. I think each one of the cases that you're talking about, and in fact,
#
this is something a lot of people have been writing about in feminism. It's like women's stories are
#
now only interesting when they're like heroes or they're victims. So they have to like out and out,
#
do something really remarkable or be like, you know, really the sort of, you know, the brunt of a brutal
#
crime. And if you look at a lot of the women-centric movies that tend to come out, but let me finish,
#
which is to say that I actually think the really interesting bargain texture is happening. It's
#
this missing middle of the narrative. Other than this police crime show, I'm going to say there was
#
other one. There was Gully Boy where I thought Alia Bhatt's role was like beautiful. It was so well
#
written. There are a few, but I think actually the factor here to me is not so much time. I mean,
#
I think there were movies in the past that Amol Palika was part of where the women were like
#
writing journals and doing beautiful, interesting things, right? I don't think it's about time.
#
It's not like over time women's representation has become better. I actually think it's about...
#
Sometimes it's often about whether women write those scripts or not. I often feel that when women
#
write or direct, there's a gaze in the way women are portrayed, they're presented, which is much
#
more open. Luck by chance at the end of the day is a very women-centric film because it is a very
#
strong woman putting her voice out there. So I see what you're saying, but I think sometimes to me,
#
it feels very sort of, oh, we have to show that there's a strong woman. So we have these tropes
#
of a strong woman and then we must show them. And if you look at Pink, for example, which I think
#
is the worst crime possible on this, it is apparently a movie about women's sexual violence,
#
but you have Amitabh Bachchan speaking through all of the film. I mean, the women barely have...
#
I think there are examples on the contrary as well. I wouldn't say that all of the women-centric
#
movies that are being made are primarily... I'm not a movie expert, so I shouldn't go too deep into it
#
so that I can't come out of it. But at the same time, I mean, just as an observer, I don't think
#
that most of the women-centric movies that are being made are to show them just as either very
#
powerful heroes or as victims. And I think at some point, I guess also what I'm trying to say is that
#
I would be very happy that the era of a superstar is over, that we are never going to have another
#
Shah Rukh Khan, because now then there is a scope to experiment with different kinds of scripts
#
and possibilities as opposed to just getting sort of overshadowed by this larger-than-life persona.
#
But you know, I don't know, let me push back against that. And this is the last thing I'll say on this,
#
which is that, I don't know, I think there's actually something very beautiful when our
#
superstars are not our politicians. When our superstars are in cricket, when our superstars
#
are in culture, when our superstars are in the creative arts. I think right now, we are living,
#
by the way, in a culture where we have superstars. We need a podcasting superstar.
#
Yeah. Well, hmm. We are looking at one. Who is that? Hmm. I'm getting different responses.
#
Yeah. Go ahead. Please finish. I'm looking at you. Yeah. But to me, actually, I think the really
#
interesting question is not whether I don't see it as a zero-sum game. I actually think you can have
#
icons who are really larger than life, and people can derive. I'm not in the business of judging
#
others for their pleasures. That's not my interest at all. If seeing a big icon makes people happy,
#
as long as you're not out there lynching people, that's fine. If you want to see very complex
#
scripts and all that, that's great as well. I think there's enough space now for all kinds of
#
mediums and stories. But I will say one thing, though. I think the world where we think that
#
everyone is watching OTT and the world of big superstars, that's a really small space. In fact,
#
most people are watching Ajay Devgan's new film. There are big stars, and in fact, those stars have
#
become so hideously masculine. If you look at the roles, Akshay Kumar, Ajay Devgan, and many of
#
these films, look at Simba, which came out, which was about a policeman, aggressively masculine. In
#
fact, there was a tweet recently which said, the only person who can save masculinity in Bollywood
#
is Shah Rukh Khan. I completely believe that. And I think that you can have that, and you can also
#
have these other stories that you're talking about, and then you and I can disagree about whether we
#
like them, whether we connect with them. That's a different story. So, Amey, this is your cue to
#
ask the more important questions. This is my cue to move on from Shah Rukh Khan, but I can't help,
#
but sort of say two things. And one is something that I mentioned in my episode with her as well,
#
that let us not forget that that film you mentioned ends with Amrish Puri, I think it was. Ja Simran,
#
yes. But please, everybody read my book to know that that can be interpreted in a very different
#
way. Yeah, but I interpret it as she has no agency. Yeah, when I watched the movie, I interpreted it
#
exactly the same way. You know what Simran should do? Simran should leave the dad,
#
leave the Naka boyfriend, and just go build a life on her. He's not a Naka boyfriend. And what
#
really irritated me is that that scene became like a legend of sorts, right? And then we saw
#
movies after movies and real life scenarios, ads, what have you made, trying to innovate.
#
But let's move on to economics. No, no, actually going back, I want to actually pick up on economics.
#
No, but here's the thing, which is that, in fact, we live in a world and I can look at that scene
#
and basically say that I judge it for not being feminist. She has no agency. She's in rural Punjab.
#
She has no job of her own. At the end of the day, I think what's happening is that, you know,
#
there is a willful acceptance of your constraints. And so we can disagree with that. But it is also,
#
it is reality. So we'll move on. And since you mentioned Dear Zindagi, I wrote about it in 2016
#
when it came out. And I just want to read out a few lines from it for our friend here.
#
So a number of points, and I'll read out two of them. And point number two was practically
#
everything Shahrukh Khan's character says is nonsense. 90% of it is banal, like Ravi Shastri
#
talking about cricket. And the other 10% is downright wrong and dangerous, like Modi talking
#
about economics. The kind of psychotherapy he's shown doing is basically quackery. And the way
#
he talks, you'd imagine he's never read a book in his life and spends 20 minutes each week on brainy
#
quotes and Wikipedia. Simply put, the guy's a buffoon. This is his character. Let me continue.
#
Point number three. No, no, I just want to say these because I'm just looking at your face as I
#
say them. I wish there was a video of this now. Point number three. I've often maintained that
#
Shahrukh Khan is the worst actor in history. I know Amitabh was his idol when he entered the industry.
#
And while Amitabh has done some monumental hamming in his time, Shahrukh knocks him out of the park.
#
Watching Shahrukh hamm it up in scenes with the wonderfully naturalistic Alia is as painful as
#
watching Amitabh hamm it up in Piku in scenes with the brilliant Irfan Khan. Is the contrast not
#
obvious to viewers? Am I the only one cringing? Stop quote. You were one of the minority cringing
#
that you know. Yeah, we've talked about it. Here it's a majority. No, no, but this is like, yeah,
#
but no, but I think that, yeah, Amit, you've discussed this before. I think let's move on.
#
No, no, no, no, I don't want to move on. I don't want to spend like a minute. No, you can't like
#
throw these quotes and say these things about the most wonderful person in our country and then say
#
all this. He is to me one of the most wonderful people in the country. He has such a huge,
#
even though scenes, you can debate whether, you know, the psychotherapy that is being,
#
there is a sense of cocoon and comfort that I know so many women who deal with like really
#
terrible workplaces watch that film. And we've talked about it. And I mentioned this in the book.
#
They walked out of that film feeling really encouraged and comforted. You know, especially
#
the thing that he says about the kursi. You remember in that film that you can explore
#
different sexual possibilities and don't feel like you need to judge yourself for it.
#
It can sound like quackery, but actually in our country where no one is actually talking about
#
sex openly, it felt very, it was actually very comforting to a lot of women. And I think we can
#
sort of judge people based on certain norms or what we think, you know, the script is, acting is,
#
all of that. But I do think we have to acknowledge that these people are playing very different
#
functions. So I just, I want to say that. And he's great.
#
You had the last word on Shah Rukh. And now you had a question for, you know,
#
you had a question for Rajeshwari as well. Yes. I actually want to know a bit about
#
what, do you still enjoy being an economist? I know we started by saying we were having this
#
conversation about the profession. When you entered the profession, that were there things
#
that you really loved about the subject and has that sort of kept you going? Or do you think now
#
you're a different kind of economist than you had thought when you had entered the field you would
#
be? I just want to get a sense of, I know that you'll come back for an episode on your back's
#
life story, but I want to know a bit more about your interest in the field and how that's you.
#
Sure. So first of all, to answer that first question, I absolutely love being an economist
#
even today. And my sense is I continue to love being that, the foreseeable future,
#
because for me it's almost like combining passion with profession.
#
So I think this had briefly mentioned in the first episode with Amit as well, that when I
#
was studying economics, I didn't really think of myself as an economist, of course, far from it.
#
I didn't even know what I was going to become. And I was sort of in the rigmarole of the Indian
#
rat race or whatever you call it, that I was going from one step to the other. I was doing
#
my graduation, post-graduation. And I think when I was doing my post-grad at some point, of course,
#
I started realizing that I do like the subject for what it is. And this was also the time when
#
India had liberalized. This was early 2000s and it was completely like the way I call it,
#
roaring to thousands in India. And mind you, I was coming from Calcutta, which was the communist
#
bastion. And there, of course, any sign of liberalization, privatization was significantly
#
more muted. But to the extent that I was witnessing it, it was a delight for me,
#
because when you're born in the 80s and you witness that, you actually
#
live through the transition of it in real life. And then I went to Delhi for my post-grad. And
#
of course, Delhi was like an eye-opener. It was a culture shock and an eye-opener, both at the same
#
time. And then when I was studying my post-grad, I think my love for economics had started in
#
Presidency College when I was doing my undergrad. When I went to Delhi, I was massively disillusioned
#
because in Delhi, everything was extremely competitive. It was about getting a job.
#
It was about showing off what your salary is and all of that thing. And that was exactly not what
#
I had in mind when I was sitting in Presidency College library and idealizing about books and
#
stuff and whatnot. And therefore, I had that period of disillusionment. And I actually went to the
#
corporate world. It was also fear of missing out. All my friends were doing it. I wanted to do it
#
as well. So I went to the corporate world. I did not like it at all. And that's when I think that
#
hankering back to what I had felt during my undergrad studies in Presidency came back.
#
And I realized that, let me give it a shot and let me actually try my hand at research
#
and see if I'm really cut out for it, if I'm going to do it. And I think that's when I
#
finally seriously started thinking of economics as a profession, as a calling. And then I went
#
to the US to do my PhD. But even throughout the US, it was again, learning about what we
#
called, talked about in the beginning of the episode, learning about the theories, the models.
#
You're basically going through the entire program of it. And while I was still doing research,
#
it was very mechanical, right? Because I wanted to get a PhD. I wanted to get some papers out.
#
So I was okay. I was doing fine, but I wasn't particularly passionate for economics and all
#
of that. I didn't really feel it per se. And then I came back to India. And later on, we can talk
#
about in different episodes, why, what, when. And when I came back to India, the funny thing
#
that happened was that I actually had to leave India, go to the US and come back to India and
#
do all of the journey to finally become an economist and think of myself as an economist.
#
And I started sort of feeling the juice of the subject, so to speak. Because when I came back
#
to India, I came to IGIDR in Bombay and I met a wonderful bunch of people, two of whom are going
#
to be here later on in the evening. And they completely changed the way I think about economics,
#
the way I wanted to apply economics. I was in that zone where like my PhD advisor, I would write
#
papers, get published in the journal, be a university academic economist. That myth was
#
completely dispelled when I met this bunch of people. And I realized that economics can be
#
a lot more fun than that. It can be made a lot more accessible to people than that.
#
And I can have a lot more fun by studying the backyard, which is the Indian economy.
#
Because until then, I hadn't thought of Indian economy at all. Because in my mind,
#
it was the American university, working on economic theories, being at the frontier of research.
#
And for the first time, I strictly remember 2014 was the year when I started thinking that I might
#
do some work on Indian economy. It will not get published in journals because nobody's interested
#
in Indian economy. I will never get a job abroad again because it's macro, who's interested in
#
Indian macro. And I was fine with all the trade-offs. It was the decision that I had to take,
#
that I was fine with these trade-offs because what lies on offer for me was very, very exciting.
#
And that's when I got involved in the drafting of the bankruptcy law. Now, for an economist
#
trained in the US, if you were to tell me seven years or eight years back before that, that I was
#
going to be involved in the drafting of a law, I would have thought, what are you kidding about?
#
I mean, my friend economists in the US have no idea about how laws are drafted, et cetera.
#
But I got involved in the drafting of the IBC, which was the most exciting, exhilarating
#
experience ever till date. I mean, for five months, we would just think, breathe bankruptcy laws,
#
which was not even my area per se. But I started understanding how Indian economy works,
#
how different vested interests work. And that's basically the start of my journey as an economist.
#
It's as recent as that. And then since then, I've just been focusing on India. And as I said,
#
it doesn't get me a lot of top journal publications. It will never get me a job
#
outside India if I ever want to go outside anywhere. But the satisfaction is enormous.
#
My friends who are economists in the US would not even remotely come close to the idea of drafting
#
a law because they are just so far away from the policy and the legal space of it. Whereas
#
what happened with me was that I got to know a whole bunch of very interesting lawyers,
#
policymakers, no academic economists, so to speak, what is called mainstream academic economists.
#
And it was a whole lot of fun. I mean, I was basically just having fun. I was called by the
#
JPC in the parliament to depose. I mean, I was in a completely different world from what I had
#
visualized when I started my PhD. And then I just fell in love with it. I just fell in love with
#
the idea of understanding Indian economy, giving it back to the best possible way that I can,
#
which is through teaching my students, writing in the media, doing a whole lot of talk shows,
#
a panel discussion. So I just make myself available whenever I get an invitation,
#
because that's my way of getting my own concepts right and also getting the concepts accessible
#
to whoever is listening out. So I think I've had a complete ball of a time since 2015 and
#
knock on wood. And I hope I anticipate that that's going to continue going forward. And as I said,
#
this is nothing the way I had visualized mainstream economics was going to be.
#
And to a large extent, the credit lies to the people that I got to know in 2014, 2015,
#
who got tremendous influences in my life. And yeah, I mean, I'm just having a whole lot of
#
fun at this point of time, although everything at the economy has gone down south since then,
#
but just analyzing it. And mind you, I mean, before 2014, I didn't even think of the Indian
#
economy per se. And now I'm really into understanding what's happening, what's going
#
on, how can I do better? How can I teach my students better? What articles can I write in
#
lay person's language so that people can understand? And it's challenging. It's exciting. So yeah,
#
I really like it. So yeah, it's definitely not the economist. I never had a vision of myself
#
as an economist. When I went to the US, I thought I was going to be one of those 10-year track
#
university professors. I'm so glad and relieved that I came back and tremendously grateful to
#
the people who have influenced me. And I think I'm just very, very fortunate from that perspective.
#
And what kind of strikes me is that, you know, that incident you narrated at the start of this
#
episode, that you're out there in the slush going towards the water and the sky is getting dark,
#
and you don't know whether you'll reach the water and you don't know whether you'll make it back.
#
And it seems like such a great metaphor for what you were just talking about, because I also kind
#
of feel like that sometimes, that sometimes you feel alone on the journey, but there's great
#
beauty and you want to do it and you're doing it and you don't know where it's going to go.
#
And eventually you'll probably drown. And it's also, by the way, very, very,
#
I don't know about the last part, but it's very risky, right? Because you're not getting
#
a huge monetary reward out of it, right? You're not getting any tangible reward and benefit for
#
that matter. You are entirely thriving on your own motivation and mental satisfaction. And to
#
go on year after year just based on that, but touchwood as of now, it's working well. I hope
#
it continues to work well, but who knows? One fine day I'll just wake up and think,
#
what am I doing with my life? But as of now, I think it's working well.
#
And I want to riff off something Shreyaana said in her last episode with me, where you said
#
something to the effect of numbers or elegant equations or whatever can move you to tears,
#
right? And I was struck by that because I sometimes feel that way, not so much about
#
economics per se, but about figuring out a part of the world. You know, there's something that's
#
muddy and suddenly it opens up and you see it clearly. It's like something that is pixelated
#
suddenly becomes high definition. You know, young Indian men, young Indian adolescent men of the
#
nineties will remember this when they were downloading porn from dial-up connections.
#
What an analogy. Thank you for taking us there. Apologies.
#
But I want to mention one thing, Amit, is that what I also realized is that it takes a very,
#
very, very long time to understand even a small part of economics. I mean, forget about the vast
#
Indian economy, right? I mean, I think I've spent seven years just trying to understand
#
monetary policy or inflation, right? And today I can at least write some meaningful, coherent
#
articles explaining that, let's say to my mother or a common person, and I'm fairly confident I'll
#
do a very good job of that. But that's just a really small percentage of the vast subject
#
that economics is. So you have to basically devote your life to something like this to be
#
able to say at the end that maybe I have a little bit of an expertise or maybe I have a little bit
#
of a specialization. And therefore people who call themselves experts, I get very skeptical about
#
those kinds of claims because you have to be very, very focused and hardworking for a very long time
#
to gain even a little bit of expertise in any subject. And focusing on Indian economy,
#
I think, has given me that concentration that there's just one thing I'm doing and I just want
#
to do it really well. You know, and I have to just, it's funny, I was listening to Rajesh
#
and I just realized one thing I wanted to just say is that often I, in fact, of late,
#
I really find myself also dealing with somewhat of an imposter syndrome because there is this
#
thing about like, do you really have the ability to, on what basis are you making claims, right?
#
Many people will ask you questions and I'm like, okay, so this is what I think. And sometimes I
#
wonder, is it tied up with my gender? Is it also tied up with the nature of economics? Exactly
#
what you said, which is that I know that even to understand employment rates, it's taken us such
#
a long period of time to construct them, to understand them. Even now there are facets of
#
it that I would not understand. And so what's happened now, sometimes to me is, you know,
#
often, for example, for the book, I'm asked lots of questions or even, you know, with my job,
#
people ask, and you have to obviously speak with a certain amount of confidence assurance. And of
#
course, I know my stuff. But sometimes even at that same time, there's this part of me that's
#
thinking, oh, this is a little bit imposterish because do you really know, you know, and you're
#
always dealing with these two voices. So I hear you, but I also sometimes then feel that
#
my battle often is to not shy away from my own argument, which is to have the conviction to say,
#
this is what I believe. I'm like, for example, we were fighting about Shah Rukh Khan right now,
#
just as an example. I believe X, he's not an economic concept, but I'm just using that.
#
I believe X, we may disagree. And that's fine. I think sometimes the, and all of us are kind of,
#
I think Amit, going back to what you had said during our last episode, which has really stayed
#
with me, all of us are winging it, right? We all come at it with our own base of evidence,
#
our own insights, our own biases, our own backstories. And I think what sometimes the
#
main thing I think that troubles me about sometimes that state of conversation is that
#
we should all be okay with saying that we're all kind of winging it and you only know as much.
#
And it's okay to then also be wrong and to update beliefs. Like this, the fact that the world is
#
Bayesian, the world should be Bayesian. We should all be updating our beliefs. That to me is if
#
there is one economic and statistical construct, which I think is so important in our lives,
#
especially the way the modern world is just constantly changing, it is this idea of Bayesian
#
probability, which is that you should be constantly updating your priors. And I think so for me,
#
I completely echo what I think Rajeshwari was saying, but I also feel that in my own self,
#
I find that I really struggle with this part imposter syndrome. And then sometimes I get angry
#
because then you're always in a room, and I'm sure this has happened to you, Rajeshwari,
#
you're always in a room with lots of men. And men also have their imposter syndrome,
#
but they deal with it by being even more know it all. They're very good at dealing with it.
#
Exactly. And then I feel like I need to be even more aggressive. And there's this like escalation
#
of aggression. And I think I'm at this stage in my career where it's not so much just a technical
#
journey, but it's also just a psychological journey of like, how do you now take what you know,
#
which you've built a long period of years, investing in building, nurturing, and then
#
engage with the world in a way which is still respectful and not this sort of constant fight.
#
So I'll say two things here. So remember, during the course of this conversation before the break,
#
you said that economics is about understanding the behavior of people, right? And therefore,
#
we should be able to interpret and analyze that and put it in simple language. But it's very,
#
very hard. I mean, to reach the stage where you can analyze the behavior of people in simple terms,
#
and to put it and express it even simpler terms, that takes years to reach that kind of confidence
#
and that you have the grasp over the basic concepts and intuition and interconnections
#
to say, okay, I can now say this. So it's a very good quality that we should all have,
#
and we should aspire to do. But what I'm trying to say is that it's a very long process. I mean,
#
you can't just become an economist and get trained and start doing that, right? You have to build
#
years of expertise and knowledge. And it's good that if you sort of try to focus on that.
#
And the other thing that I will try to say is that I think I was always very conscious about the fact
#
that I'm entering into a male dominated profession. And somewhere down the line,
#
that was a very, very important factor in my mind. And again, much of this will come when we talk
#
about my life backstory, but I became even more conscious of it when I came back to India.
#
Because in India, I realized there are two things that you fight against as an aspiring economist.
#
One is your gender and the other is your age, right? You are never taken seriously, particularly
#
in policy circles, unless you are of a certain age, you have graying hair and all of that.
#
I mean, before that, people won't even take you seriously in whatever you are saying, no matter
#
how well you know the concepts, et cetera. And on top of that, if you're a woman, so if you're a
#
young woman recently returned from the US, there is no possibility that anybody is going to take
#
you seriously. So I had to struggle. And now, of course, I mean, I'm not even there yet. I'm still
#
in the midway, but I had to struggle a lot to make my voice heard, even as something like a panel
#
discussion where everybody else would be a man. And I'm just struggling to make my voice heard on
#
one particular question where they're all just being very aggressive and their body language is
#
very different. So you're fighting at multiple levels. You're trying to understand the subject.
#
You're trying to understand what's happening in the economy. And you're trying to sort of be the
#
lone female voice in a room full of men. You also don't want to look that you're being overshadowed
#
by them. So it's a constant struggle. And out of all of that, if you get one output ready, where
#
you can say, okay, I've understood this slice of the world, I think that's a tremendous achievement.
#
And that's what I pat myself at the back. You know, in fact, I have to just say, in fact,
#
now my goal when I go into a room and it sounds is actually I'm very comfortable being overshadowed
#
because then I often know that maybe I've learned a lot about male psychology, modes of behavior,
#
and I know it's material for my next book, you know, that's the way I've now learned to deal
#
with it. Because, you know, in life, I've just, especially in this field, because you do have,
#
there's a kind of person who enters this arena of the world, right, somewhat type A,
#
fairly ambitious, everybody's really bright, everyone, you know, is coming at it with their
#
own good intentions. And so with that, there's always going to be this elbowing, there'll be a
#
lot, there's a lot of status jockeying, that's just, you know, the thing that's part of life.
#
And now I've actually, I think my way of handling it is to just almost say there was a time, in fact,
#
I was the exact opposite, I want to just, you know, I want to like be, you know, this thing,
#
I need to be heard. And, but I learned, in fact, I'll just share this story, one of the first
#
bureaucrats I ever worked with, and he who shall definitely not be named, used to not even look at
#
me. And he'd look at my male colleagues, and then the question would come to me, but through my male
#
colleagues. And in fact, the same chap was, I had walked into a room on my own, and he just kept
#
looking behind me at the door. And he said, World Bank kahan hai? Wow. Yeah, exactly, right. Now,
#
now, cut to it's been nearly seven years, seven, eight years. He's, I know, he's going through a
#
really difficult time, because there are lots of really powerful women in the service. And he has
#
to deal with the fact that, you know, there are more and more women coming in to positions of
#
authority and are also in think tanks. And, and I can see him struggling. And so I've sort of learned
#
to, I used to get really angry. And maybe I should still get angry. But I think I've also learned that
#
perhaps this is where creativity and humor and all of that really helps, right? Because you just have
#
to be able to just wear it a bit lightly. Or else it just becomes, it can just be exhausted. I think
#
I think you're right that I think the the male economists, and since that's the only profession I
#
know, it's a struggle for them to, right? I mean, they are used to a traditional world where it's
#
just them, right? And suddenly you see these women walking into the room, who are equally, if not
#
more competent, they also have a voice, they're aggressive, they want to speak up. How do you deal
#
with that kind of two genders in the same room? I think men struggle a lot more than women. That's
#
been my experience. I'd actually cut my men a little less slack than you're cutting them. Because
#
I think I think it's actually a welcome sort of is welcome growth. You know, the men should welcome
#
looking, you know, being able to, but it doesn't happen that way. No, and another thing that
#
I feel like there should be a segue side episode, which we will not record.
#
Yeah, we can do another five hour episode on this. But one thing that strikes me from what both of
#
you are saying, which is very poignant, and this is something I've noticed for every single female
#
guest who's come on the show, is that to get to wherever they are, they've had to jump more hoops
#
than any man who would have to like just being conscious all the time, like in a sense, men can
#
be like feral animals, not even be aware of the impulses and what they how the egos are making
#
them behave. And they're just going through all of those motions. But women have to be constantly
#
aware of these dynamics that why do I get interrupted all the time? Why do I get talked
#
down on? And you have to come even have the opposite experience where I have been invited
#
to events because they wanted to have a woman on stage. I mean, it's just like you go from one
#
extreme where you are genuinely invited, maybe because you're good, but then you enter a room
#
full of 40 men and you have to be loud and aggressive, otherwise you can't be heard,
#
to the other extreme where you're invited only because they need to have a woman on stage,
#
doesn't matter what your merit and what your arguments are. And what do you do in that kind
#
of a forum? Do I turn it down? Do I show up? What do I do? So it's like you're jostling these two
#
different extremes. And while in the middle, you're just trying to figure your own shit out,
#
basically. I also think a lot of it is, you know, women are socialized also to just constantly be
#
aware of the gaze of everyone in the room. And even gaze that doesn't exist. I definitely have
#
had moments when I have thought that male colleagues of mine are looking down on my argument
#
when actually later I realized that that was not true at all. And when I talk to men,
#
they are not, they haven't internalized the gaze of the other to that extent. Maybe it's just the
#
boss, right? But I will also, I'll agree with you on one thing, which is that I do, I hear what
#
Rajeshwari is saying, and I've seen this, men are struggling as well. We have a crisis of masculinity.
#
It's in all professions. But I agree with it, which is that the less slack I give is sometimes
#
it really irritates me. And I see this now a lot with more and more women entering the kinds of
#
things that are said behind in the sort of, there is still a locker room, right? Even amongst
#
economists, there is locker room talk, boys who work at things. There are things that are said.
#
It's the typical thing, right? If a female economist has made a good name for herself,
#
there must be something to it. Who's the male who's supporting her or who she's sleeping with?
#
As brazen as that, right? I mean, there is something more to it than just a success as an economist.
#
Absolutely. But if it's a male economist, of course, I mean, come on, he's just brilliant.
#
He's hardworking. Who'd sleep with them anyway?
#
Yeah, exactly. Those adjectives are not applied to the woman at the first brush. And you just
#
know it. And at some point, you just brush it off and say, you know what? I don't care.
#
Yeah, exactly. I mean, I honestly don't care
#
what you're going to say about me because you're going to say it nevertheless. So I'll just do what
#
I want to do. And whatever you want to talk, keep talking. So I think at some point, I think we
#
develop a very thick skin. And that's the only way to survive and do well. And now I don't even
#
notice the men in the room, right? I mean, they're all people. They're there. I do my job. They do
#
their job. And I'm out of it. I mean, I've reached that stage at least. And I'm happy about that.
#
No, I do notice the, I think I'm still at this phase. I do have to deal with that gaze.
#
It does bother me. The back, the back talk also bothers me because one here, the one thing about,
#
of course, this is, I don't know what Bombay is like, but in Delhi, people only say mean things
#
about you to strangers because they know that you will hear them eventually. Like it just circles
#
back, right? Like the world is small. And so of course it bothers one, but I've now also realized
#
that I have to just acknowledge exactly what Rajeshwari was saying, which is that it is part
#
of a big social shift that I think the profession, men and women are going through. So I may be part
#
of the generation that just has to deal with some of the fallout of it. And that's fine because,
#
you know, so much is otherwise is going well, but there is this psychological nonsense that
#
you're dealing with, along with having to be technically proficient, which I do think that
#
at least men in the profession, I don't think face as much. And let's hope that changes.
#
I think the scrutiny that we are subjected to is a lot higher. You have to prove your metal a lot
#
harder and a lot more. But I love Shrena's way of dealing with it, which is I'm going to put it in
#
my next book, which is great. I can't wait for your next book. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So we have
#
like 15 minutes left before Shrena's got to go to this top secret meeting. So we'll just rush
#
through some broad questions. And when I say rush through, let's rush through them because people
#
have and these are kind of big issues. And one is I have a question for each of you on inflation.
#
So Rajeshwari, you're the macro person. And my question is that everybody wants to know what's
#
causing it and what can be done and so on and so forth. Is there a potted answer to this or is it
#
too complicated? I mean, okay, let me try to cut it really short and not give a very longish answer.
#
So what's causing it? A lot of supply chain constraints, right? So the supply side has
#
gotten completely messed up, one because of the pandemic. Now, because of the Russia-Ukraine war,
#
we import oil, crude oil, edible oil, fertilizer, all the major items that we import. The prices
#
have gone up globally. So we are basically importing that high inflation and also the
#
China lockdowns because of the resurgence of the pandemic that is further squeezing the supply chain.
#
So it's a supply side related. So inflation happens when demand is greater than the supply.
#
Now, demand is weak and supply is even weaker. So that is creating the situation of excess demand,
#
which is pushing prices up, as simple as that. So it's basically the supply side constraints
#
that's causing inflation and how it is going to go away. Well, there has to be some waking up
#
required on the part of the Reserve Bank of India to understand that inflation control is ultimately
#
their job and they need to go back to the table to do their job. It's basically as simple as that.
#
But in reality, of course, they're far from it because they are dealing with multiple objectives,
#
this complete lack of central bank independence, et cetera, all of that is going on. But bottom
#
line is you have to use monetary policy to deal with inflation and that's not getting done.
#
And my question for Shrena actually comes from Shruti Rajgopalan because the moment I said on
#
Twitter that I'm chatting with two economists, she immediately replied, who are these economists?
#
And I was like, they're both friends of yours, don't worry. So her question for you is,
#
and it's a great question, which is how does inflation impact men and women differently?
#
Oh, gosh, that is a very good question. So a couple of things. One is, well, if you look at
#
intra-household distribution, because one thing we know right, bargaining theory, intra-household
#
bargaining theory teaches us that if prices go up or household aggregate consumption indicators,
#
because a price amount is impacted, essentially women's access to goods within the household
#
always becomes lower. So nutrition outcomes could be affected if you start to reduce
#
consumption of goods, consumption of oil, consumption of basic food baskets. There's
#
a nutritional aspect to it, which is very much happening. We're not yet seeing core evidence on
#
it, but anecdotally and certainly in research that's coming out of journalists, you're picking
#
this up. So that's one. So anytime household resources are squeezed because of gender norms
#
within the household, women eat less, women consume less, investment in also women's human
#
capital may start to reduce because you need to offset the increase in price. So the way you
#
do that is you manage the amount that is being consumed by female members of the families.
#
That's one. So there's an impact on nutrition and health, human capital, all of that. The other,
#
which is I think more worrying is sometimes families respond to increases in prices,
#
particularly now since we're looking at transport prices being impacted, which I think is a very
#
big and important section, is that anyway, as we know, families are reluctant to let women travel
#
out or let them use money to essentially access the world outside. The moment you now have a world
#
in which those prices are going further up, unsurprisingly, the reluctance is only going
#
to now find an excuse. So almost patriarchy will find an excuse in prices. I think that's
#
the best way to put it, right? Which is to say, well, now it's just become so expensive,
#
let the boy go, let him handle all the dealings with the world outside in one travel out.
#
Right? I'm keeping this really micro and very simple just for people who don't come from an
#
econ background to understand. And then you basically say, well, let the boy go, he can do
#
household marketing, anything else he needs to do, you don't necessarily need to go to.
#
So there are fears that feminist economists have had that inflation actually leads to
#
reduced mobility outcomes often for women as well. For men, it's far more straightforward, right? It
#
is actually, of course, an impact on income, impact on savings, all kinds of insurance
#
behavior as well is impacted. Your labor market decisions about how you work, where you work,
#
all of that would be impacted as well. But I think Shruti's question, which is, I think,
#
why she always asks these really good questions, is also to get us to think that this is why you
#
need a feminist lens to economics. Because if you were to just look, and I think Rajeshwari
#
will agree with me, if you were to just look at the impact on inflation, much like medicine,
#
where a lot of the experiments for drugs are done on men's bodies, and then you report results
#
saying that this works for women also. Actually, a lot of these channels work very differently
#
based on norms, right? Gender is a good example of that because it's such a strong norm here.
#
So I think the answer to her question is that because of intra-household bargains,
#
I would anticipate, theory would suggest that consumption of core goods, investment in human
#
capital, and mobility outcomes would be impacted. Data has not yet been fully tracked, but we do
#
know that when this happens, you do tend to see some of these, but in the realm of correlation.
#
And the last thing I will say here is that another thing that does happen often is that
#
the reliance on welfare increases, particularly for women. I think going back to what we were
#
talking about. Also what happens is reliance on gold increases. So buying of gold jewelry
#
goes up significantly when inflation is high and volatile. And that is something that is very
#
damaging for the economy because they're essentially taking the savings out of the formal sector.
#
And we see that always happen in India.
#
And you mentioned the feminist lens on economics. I remember one of my past guests, Menal Pandey,
#
when I was editing this policy magazine, Pragati had once written a piece for me about in the
#
context of agriculture, but it's true in any other context, is that it's typical to talk about the
#
agricultural problem with Indian agriculture in a particular way. But if you look deeper,
#
you go one layer deeper, there's women in Indian agriculture, and that's a much worse problem.
#
And similarly, you look at literally any issue in India, and you look far enough, you'll find
#
that there's another layer, and there are other women there, and they're not being spoken about,
#
and it's almost like it's one homogenous.
#
But the problem is that just as we were discussing, just as no one cares about why
#
women's LFPR is so low, no one cares about how inflation is going to impact women from
#
a policymaker's perspective. Because it's just like a complete non-existent section of the
#
population. Why would women be impacted by inflation? What about women's jobs, right?
#
So it's not even in the discourse. Here, it's a really small minority that is discussing it.
#
But if you go out there, and if you talk to a central bank, or if you talk to the policymakers,
#
they'll just give you a look and say, what are you even talking about?
#
Why should we even worry about these things?
#
And in fact, what I find most insulting is often when this question is asked during budget
#
conversation, what is the gharilu budget? How will the housewife react to the budget?
#
So inflation often, in fact, the way I just answered it, typically when in newsrooms,
#
and I think Rajeshwari is rigorously nodding her head in yes, when you discuss inflation
#
for women, there is a discussion, but it is this steeped in masculinist models of the economy,
#
where the impact on inflation is only on how wives have to cut corners to manage the household
#
budget. But actually, we live in a country when there is inflation, wives' consumption
#
is going to reduce, that we often don't talk about, right? I don't know, I really, one thing
#
I just want to echo, I think no one, I don't know, but no one cares, because we hear a lot
#
of lip service, these schemes for women, all of that. I think it's in the realm of lip service,
#
but actually getting into the granularities of, you know, I've often now said markets don't like
#
single women in particular, look at the housing market, credit markets, instruments that are out
#
there. I don't see, I would love for the Ministry of Women and Child to say, you know what, we're
#
going to set up at least a commission or something to look at how do we make some of these markets
#
more friendly for single women, because you don't have a dual income, you're still often supporting
#
families, you're your own elderly. It's completely non-existent. It's non-existent. And yet, actually,
#
we are entering a world where more and more women like myself are going to be single for longer
#
periods of time. We are dealing with markets, and these markets are actually core to the jobs
#
crisis, because you're not going to solve the jobs crisis without attacking the housing and credit
#
markets as well. In fact, I'll tell you that, you know, if the whole idea of financial planning for
#
yourself, that is completely non-existent in the women's realm. I mean, you wouldn't see financial
#
advisors talking to women and giving them advice on how do you plan your pension insurance, etc.,
#
because the entire discussion is very head of the family centric, and that's obviously very male
#
centric. But what if I, as a woman, irrespective of whether I'm single or married, I want to do my
#
own financial planning, build my own financial portfolio, where is the advice for me? And that
#
is just so difficult to find, because no, no, wait, it has to be in conjunction with the head of the
#
household, and it has to be a family planning. It cannot be an individualistic single woman or whatever
#
married woman planning. So I think this is going to take decades to even reach a stage where we can
#
see any change happen. I think there's a lot to think about in everything both of you said. The
#
only part I will disagree with is I don't think a ministry setting up a commission is going to be
#
helpful. This is my Delhi-Pana coming out, but here's the thing. But I'm using that, it could be
#
anything. Look, but I really think we need an instrument. That's it. Yeah, no, it's a big
#
problem. It has to be solved, but ministry and commission are not doing it. So we've got five
#
minutes left. There are tons of great questions. So I just want to apologize to people who took
#
the trouble to put these in Twitter and say, look, I'm so sorry. Some fantastic questions, really.
#
We'll come back again. We will come back.
#
Exactly. So you'll come back again and we'll get to ask them. So I'll end with this one last
#
question. And I really like the way it was framed. And it's interesting, which is from a gentleman
#
named Das, whose Twitter ID is at kitchencamprof. And he asked, what is the cost of happiness? Is
#
it trending up or down or sunk? Maybe you can answer this in a personal way if you can't give
#
a generalized answer, obviously. So say the question is, what is the cost of happiness?
#
What is the cost of happiness? Is it trending up or down? It's trending up. It's trending up
#
because of the costs of, well, first, just the financial costs of seeking pleasure, stability,
#
economic. The first layer of happiness is some amount of stability and assurance. Those we were
#
just talking about inflation, that's trending up, right? It's trending up also because our social
#
institutions and our political institutions, our discourse is such that to even voice, voice is a
#
second layer of happiness. The cost of voice is very high nowadays. We all know it. And the third
#
reason I think it's also trending up is when you have conservative turns in societies like we are
#
going through, often happiness requires taking risks and saying things that may be misunderstood.
#
And I think now the costs of being misunderstood are very high. So I think to me, it's trending up.
#
So I would say once again, I can't help think of the gender here, right? And I'm going to think
#
exclusively from the female lens. I think definitely the cost is going up because the cost
#
of happiness going up means that in order to do something that makes you happy, what are the
#
obstacles that you're facing? And I think increasingly, if I'm redefining my happiness
#
as something that I want to go out in the world, I want to make a career for myself, I want to earn
#
my own money, and I want to step into the male dominated profession, of course, I am encountering
#
obstacle after obstacle. And to that extent, that cost of my happiness is of course going up. Now,
#
if I compare that with, let's say, a previous generation who were defining happiness differently,
#
that I'm just going to stay at home, look after my, there's nothing wrong in it. I'm just saying the
#
choice set may have changed. And the more we are getting more ambitious, the more we want to be
#
empowered, the more we are paying a cost for it because we are encountering more and more obstacles.
#
So I think definitely, and it's going to continue to trend up.
#
Gosh, I hate this. We entered on a pessimistic note, where...
#
I wouldn't say it's pessimistic, no? I mean...
#
But it's a cost that all of us are, many of us are bearing.
#
Yeah, I think that's the...
#
And we're okay to bear the cost, right? We are not complaining.
#
It is what it is. I mean...
#
It is what it is, exactly.
#
I mean, would I rather bear the cost as opposed to just, you know, do the opposite? Of course,
#
I would bear the cost. So to that extent, it's fine.
#
Wonderful. So Rajeshwari, Shreyana, thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been such
#
a great conversation. It should have gone on for five hours more, but okay, we'll make do this time.
#
And you will come back again.
#
Hundred percent. Thank you so much for inviting us back, Amit.
#
Thank you so much, Amit. And it was a pleasure knowing Shreyana as well in this podcast.
#
I think we basically just ended up having a good adda and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
#
Except that before this, you were bong-splaining her name to me and saying,
#
Amit, it's not Shreyana, it's Shroyona. And then she came and said, it's Shreyana.
#
Yes, I've been proved wrong. And on that note...
#
It was a magical time being here with Rajeshwari.
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode, check out the show notes for many more rabbit holes.
#
You can follow Shreyana on Twitter at bshreyana. You can follow Rajeshwari on Twitter,
#
not because she's not on social media, which is why she is so productive and gets so much work done.
#
You can follow me on Twitter though, because I'm not quite as productive at Amit Verma,
#
A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A. You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in.
#
Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene and the Unseen? If so, would you like to support
#
the production of the show? You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contribute
#
any amount you like to keep this podcast alive and kicking. Thank you.
