Raghuram Rajan and I have written a book on ideas for an improved economic future for India. Releasing first week of December (for now in India). Brought to you by the wonderful folks at
@PenguinIndia
. Press release 👇
Available for pre=order on Amazon:
We're absolutely thrilled to introduce
#BreakingTheMould
, a thought-provoking journey into India's economic future by the brilliant stalwarts, Dr. Raghuram Rajan and
@rohlamba
Click below to know more & pre-order your copy now.
0/ A holiday economic theory reading list. Some of my favorite pieces on theory that can be read with minimal sweat, but with the maximal intellectual reward. In no particular order:
JP tea stall at the Delhi School of Economics is an institution in itself. From game theory to macroeconomics, from geopolitics to local university politics, and much more… it is has seen it all :)
A walk down memory lane: Hanging out at the JP tea stall at my alma mater Delhi School of Economics
@UnivofDelhi
. Spent many hours at the tea stall back in the day. Thank you Prof. Ram Singh (Director of DSE) for inviting me back!
India has just recorded an impressive 8.2 percent growth rate for the financial year. Interpreting GDP numbers correctly is important, otherwise we can prescribe misdirected policies. What is behind the headline number? Short 🧵
Raghuram Rajan & I write in the
@timesofindia
on India's growth model: emphasis on a clear economics vision to work towards--one of openness & steadied distance between state & market, perils of blindly aping the China model, and the promise of services.
It is Srinivasa Ramanujan's birthday today, one of my heroes. Let's quickly prove a crazy identity, popularly called the Ramanjuan summation:
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +... = -1/12.... What??
New paper: A simple (enough) repeated Bertrand model to show how (i) quickness of response & (ii) temporary commitment afforded by algorithms can facilitate collusion. In two price model, monopoly profit emerges as the unique equilb outcome, & more...
Nobel Prize in Economics 2022: Many of Doug Diamond’s path breaking papers on banking are co-authored with Raghuram Rajan. The 2000 and 2001 papers are really beautiful.
Screen shot from the scientific background note put out by the Nobel Prize.
Raghuram Rajan & I write in
@timesofindia
reflecting on 75th year of independence: The audacious choice that was democracy, the design flaws that have cropped up, how solutions to current political-economic woes lie in making a renewed case for lib dem.
My essay (w/ Raghuram Rajan) in
@ForeignAffairs
on the successes and failures of the Indian economy, the challenges next government will face, and the remarkable pro-incumbency that seems to favor the Modi government despite (at best) a mixed economy performance.
(not our
The Afghanistan airspace was closed, so the captain took a longer route. We went over the Karakoram (I think), and it looked like this for over half hour 🙃
Nice piece by S. Aiyar in Sunday edition of the
@timesofindia
. Echoes arguments in our book Breaking the Mold: One of the greatest economic success stories of India in recent years has been rise of Global Capability Centers employing 3.2 million & exporting over US$ 100 billion
Indian history/political economy enthusiasts, let this be your one indulgence for the weekend: An absolute master class by Srinath Raghavan on the economic framework the polity chose in early 1970s that continues to endure. Excited for forthcoming book.
PBM
@pbmehta
is one of finest, if not THE finest, minds in the humanities and social science in India. He is also an amazing mentor to younger scholars. His moral core is unbending to any wing— left or right. What are we doing?
This morning Breaking the Mould is no.1 on the best sellers list across all book categories on
@amazonIN
🙏🙏🙏. Did you get your copy? Available in bookstores and here: ,
@PenguinIndia
.
1/ Inverse Selection, new paper with
@MarkusEconomist
and Carlos Segura-Rodriguez.
With the advent of Big Data, AI and Machine Learning, should we think about standard screening models, eg. used for insurance or credit markets, differently?
On the merits and demerits of production linked incentives for manufacturing in India.
A short note with Rahul Chauhan and Raghuram Rajan on a framework for evaluating the progress of this policy:
What is our new book Breaking the Mould with Raghuram Rajan about? Here is a bite sized explainer. For more, pre-order your copy here: . Brought to you by
@PenguinIndia
.
Celebrating the amazing Vijay Krishna this weekend at
@PennStateEcon
. With his friends from grad school, all Hugo Sonnenschein protégées: (l to r) Phil Reny, Dilip Abreu, Vijay Krishna and David Pearce.
A beautiful short essay by Qingmin Liu (
@columbia_econ
) on the desired levels of abstraction in economic theory:
"The pursuit of pure intellectualism can sometimes lead to a detachment from the practical applications of economics—an applied discipline at
Sometimes I feel its just the road and me. After everything I've seen, the expanse of emptiness seems too gigantic to bridge. Day 68. On The Road With The Pandemic
1/ Myerson 1999. "Nash equilibrium & history of economic theory." JEL. Written with characteristic Myersonian elegance. "how a few short papers by a young mathematician achieved one of the great watershed breakthroughs in the history of social science."
Prof. Arunava Sen is a legend. An excellent economic theorist who has mentored generations of students from India, imbuing in them a deep respect for knowledge, and opening their horizons to a career in academia. Thank you Sir 🫡
Some pre-release comments from academics, industry leaders, and policymakers who've read the early drafts of Breaking the Mould, forthcoming book by Raghuram Rajan and me, brought to you by
@PenguinIndia
. Pre-order your copy here:
A pleasure and an honor to talk to the vishvaguru of knowledge curation,
@amitvarma
, on his popular podcast, The Seen and the Unseen. We talk about many things, join many dots, and had a lot of fun. Thanks for having me Amit.
He's an economist with a poet's soul.
He's studied number theory & is an expert on policy.
He's studied Urdu & dreams in shairi.
@rohlamba
joins me in episode 378 of The Seen and the Unseen to talk economics, society, poetry & more:
Smashing episode!
Finally got my copy… Do check out this new book by Nikhil Menon on how India went about building a remarkable statistical apparatus to shape a ‘planned’ economy. Superb scholarship and story telling :)
So proud to announce my first PhD student, Ilia Krasikov (seen here with his trusted friend Amber), will soon be an Assistant Professor of Economics at
@WPCareySchool
at ASU. Read about his research here: , invite him for seminars & conferences 🤓
Just finished reading this excellent (survey) essay on collusion by
@SylvainChassang
and Juan Ortner. Great overview, written accessibly, with `open problems' to think about. Graduate students, devour right away :)
In the
@timesofindia
today w/ Chauhan and Rajan...
Data shows lower-middle-class
1. on the edge because of the pre-pandemic
economic slowdown,
2. now been forced by into selling property and borrowing for consumption,
3. many moved back to agriculture.
While we rightfully celebrate growth momentum, we should keep an eye on
1) the GDP-GVA divergence
2) GDP deflator-CPI divergence
3) low figures for private consumption and investment
4) the stagnation of small and medium enterprises,
5) low jobs growth in manufacturing and
Thanks so much
@kyleichan
(and all the others responding) for engaging with my lecture at
@PrincetonCGI
There seems to be some knee-jerk confusion---let me try to address that briefly, starting with the chips industry in India: 1/
Apple doesn’t manufacture iPhones itself. Foxconn mostly does. Yet Apple’s market cap is 40x Foxconn’s.
@rohlamba
made this thought-provoking point at yesterday’s conference while arguing that India should focus less on manufacturing and more on high-skilled services.
Raghuram Rajan & I write in
@timesofindia
on the obsession with economic growth as the glue for nationalism.. that channelizes passions of our people to productive action, turning them away from allure of identity politics (with a quote from
@suketumehta
)
Getting tired of “even for strategic reasons” the West should be sending vaccines to the East and global South, because what if a variant comes back... There are times when even a game theorist abhors using “strategic”. Just do it because it is the right thing to do.
Loving the
@rogerfederer
graduation speech:
"Effortless is a myth."
"Won only 54% of the points I played."
"Life is bigger than the court."
The legend keeps growing and aging with grace.
Raghuram Rajan & I write in the
@timesofindia
on recalibration of individual versus group in society, on individual as unit of citizenry both in how state governs us & in how we interact amongst ourselves. to help weakest amongst groups & forge new groups.
Taught
@ArielRubinstein
's famous paper on email game in my masters' game theory class today. After filling up board with the contagion argument, we took a pause to appreciate its beauty. Then I asked the students "Is your mind blown?" They smiled in assent and exclaimed "Yea".
Interesting story in the
@EconomicTimes
last week on how some small manufacturers are finding it difficult to be profitable, as global competition and competition from large domestic firms is making their model unsustainable.... And they are choosing to migrate to new businesses
11/ Haile 2020, “Structural vs. reduced form: Language, confusion, and models in empirical economics." working slides. Superb deck to understand (amongst other things) role of models in empirical work. Hope
@PhilHaile
can do a Zoom lecture on this soon!
3/ Geanakoplos 1992. “Common Knowledge.” JEP. Zuper piece, lucidly written. Lots of interesting puzzles, great for teaching. When Moriarty says "All I have to say has already crossed your mind," Holmes retorts "then possibly my answer has crossed yours."
I agree with
@Gokul_Sahni
: the choice of photo and the western gaze on India amongst some intellectual elites (not in general) is problematic. The essay though is an attempt at an honest appraisal.
Quite the photo (even if not chosen by the authors) – pointedly ignoring the infrastructure boom of the last decade, especially for roads. Can’t change a gaze that refuses to change.
Are you teaching graduate economic theory semester? Here is a wonderful paper by
@homoludio
to teach in your class.
In many markets, a two-sided centralized platform, and decentralized bilateral trades thrive simultaneously. What is a good theory for such markets? Buckle up...
As we wrote in our piece here, the composition of the growth in the private sector is tilting towards large capital intensive firms, which is the reason India is seeing a "jobs crisis" despite decent growth numbers and a booming stock market.
New paper: A repeated game where many stage games are possible and players are maximally uncertain about the future evolution of these games. Are we playing a prisoner's dilemma tomorrow or a coordination game? This is an uncertain repeated game.
2/ Blackwell & DeGroot 1986. “A conversation with David Blackwell.” Stat Science. After his PhD at 21, "There were 105 black colleges at that time & I wrote 105 letters of application." Beautiful discussion on a gamut of ideas & his intellectual life.
In today's
@timesofindia
, Raghuram Rajan & I take stock of recent growth numbers. A big silver lining is promising rise in service exports, from $6 billion a month pre-pandemic to almost $16b now. A globalization in services presents a big opportunity.
Excellent talk by Prof. Devesh Kapur on Indian migrants and diaspora in the US… at the
@PrincetonCGI
India conference this morning. This famous graph plots migrants (size of circle represents magnitude of population), measuring education on x-axis and income on y-axis.
Arjun state of mind:
किन्तु निष्काम कर्म कैसे संभव है वासुदेव? फल का ज्ञान ही तो कर्म करवाता है। और यदि दृष्टि फल से ही हट जाये तो कोई कर्म करेगा ही क्यों?
A worrying sign continues to be tepid private consumption growth. In fact the lower middle class are not consuming much as good jobs are scarce and incomes have stagnated. A lot of the growth is being driven by the government's impressive capital expenditure. However, it is not
GDP = GVA + taxes - subsidies. Over last few quarters GVA growth has gone down and GDP is recording a higher number because subsidies this year have decreased 23 percent year on year. GVA is at 7.2 for the financial year. Eventually GDP & GVA tend to converge.
The second issue to look out for is the GDP deflator. To get real GDP growth we deflate nominal GDP growth with the price level. India's nominal GDP was 9.6 percent this fiscal year. That means a GDP deflator of 1.4 percent. But inflation according to CPI is in the range of 5
Hi
@JohnHCochrane
, do look into our paper (w/
@MarkusEconomist
and Segura-Rodriguez). Our starting point is exactly what you state: "do people fundamentally know more than insurers?" this "asymmetric info backward" leads to... Inverse selection.
@anup_malani
Yes, but why, with Meta's entry to health in the news, and everyone fluttering about data, why do we repeat the parable that people fundamentally know more than insurers -- armed with full health records, intersected with meta's data, mined by AI? Asymmetric info is backward!
A well spent evening moderating a discussion with erudite economists Raghuram Rajan and
@rohlamba
as they release their book: Breaking The Mould: reimagining India’s future. . ‘How does India become rich before it becomes old?’ is the intriguing question that the authors attempt
13(end)/ Here is hoping we all continue to theorize as we end this painful year for mankind. In addition to the putting that critical structure on data, it may provide us "narratives that make us look at reality differently" (David Pearce). A promise for our polarized times.
4/ Morris 1995. "The common prior assumption in economic theory.” E&P. This beauty was Stephen's first chap of PhD thesis! Does rationality imply CP? Does relaxing CP make theorizing uninteresting? Is failure of CP a failure of information processing?
.
Faruk Gul is a remarkable teacher and mentor, and (obviously!) a phenomenal economic theorist. My favorite classroom experience ever were his three lectures on Savage's theory of choice under uncertainty. He has a magical depth into the world of economic theory.
Few people I know are as brilliant and as humble as Faruk Gul whose birthday was celebrated this weekend at a conference in Princeton. A program full of wonderful presentations by his students was testimony to his skills as a mentor.
Preparing notes to teach Savage's theory of choice under uncertainty. David Kreps called it the “crowing glory” of choice theory, and in my notes from grad school I had scribbled: Faruk Gul looks at us in a zen state and exclaims "Today is a big day for us, we will learn Savage."
10/ Read everything by/on Joan Robinson. Remarkable economic theorist of 20th cntry. Found a beautiful essay by her in Cambridge library "Economics is a serious subject (1932)" hard to find copy. Here is NYT on her in 1972 & thread by
@Undercoverhist
Robinson's 1932 publication is 20pages “Economics is a Serious Subject: the apologia of an economist to the mathematician, the scientist and the plain man,” and I can’t find a full version. If you have it, I’d love to read a copy for the genealogy of a concept I’m working on, thx
Perhaps my favorite pairing of actors on screen in Hindi cinema in the last decade---
@irrfank
and
@deepikapadukone
in Piku.
That scene when he says.. "Matha kharab nahin hai mera"
7/ Gilboa, Postlewaite & Schmeidler 2008. "Probability & uncertainty in economic modeling." JEP. Beautiful overview of subjective probabilities, Savage's theory of choice, limits of the sure thing principle, Ellsberg paradox, and multiple priors approach.
8/ Ostrom 1999 "Coping with the tragedy of commons." Ann Rev Pol Sc. Hardin's idea arguably one of greatest insights of recent times. Ostrom elegantly & persuasively recasts the question in view of evidence from the field and the lab. Research ideas here!
The Kailāśa temple is an 8th century marvel cut out of a single rock cliff.
Took a stroll there this morning with my guru, PhD advisor,
@stephenedmorris
.
Robust, eh!
New short piece on mobile phones manufacturing and production linked incentives in India, with Rahul Chauhan and Raghuram Rajan.
How should we make sense of the data on phone exports and what is the right metric for understanding how PLI is working...
Just discovered this cool journal
@FrontYoungMinds
in which scholars across fields explain their research in simple terms that is understandable to kids... And the essays are reviewed by kids :)
Taught dynamic choice this week at
@PennStateEcon
. Starting with three classic results: Koopmans, Fishburn-Rubinstein & Kreps-Porteus, and ended with an excellent recent paper on time lotteries and stochastic impatience by DeJarnette-Dillenberger-
@PietroOrtoleva
-
@danielgott
.
12/ Extra credit! The Economist's "School briefs". Lucidly written summaries of some great ideas of modern economics. . And, "A mathematician's apology (1940)" by GH Hardy-- on the value of abstraction beyond immediate applications
6/ Rubinstein 2006. “Dilemmas of an economic theorist.” Ecmta. What are we all trying to do writing models? Rubinstein at his insightful (and provocative) best. "I do think we are simply the tellers of fables, but is that not wonderful?"
Happy birthday to the incredible
@Mylovanov
. What courage and what grace in the midst of such adversity in Kyiv.
The community of economists is so proud to call you our own. Stay safe my friend and see you soon.
This week: Excited about giving three lectures on dynamic contracts and mechanism design at
@OxfordEconDept
and
@NuffieldCollege
. Come drop by if you are in the area!
In the Business Standard (
@bsindia
) today, snippets from the discussion yesterday on India's path to greater economic prosperity. Grateful for the opportunity.
"Elegance is a deep conceptual understanding expressed through a minimal set of ideas. Elegance is visceral, it is transparent and self-evident."
--- Dilip J. Abreu
5/ Aumann & Hart 2005. “An interview with Robert Aumann." Macro Dyn. To be savored with a steaming cup of chai (or whisky on rocks). Brimming with deep moments. Aumann's view on the folk theorem, how agree to disagree came about, religion, much more.
?
A principled framework for removing finiteness assumptions from theoretical models. Applicability depends on the theorem statement only, not on its proof ⟹ Proofs are short+reusable. Demonstrated by array of examples from revealed-preference theory
Looking forward to talking about Algorithmic Pricing at the NYU IO day today
@NYUSternEcon
. If you are in the city, drop by for some IO (industrial organization) shenanigans!
The whole world has a stake in India’s future. Now available, Raghuram Rajan and
@rohlamba
's Breaking the Mold shows why and how
#India
needs to blaze a new path for economic development if it’s to succeed.
Learn more about this persuasive book: