aroonwithaview

Category: Econ thoughts

  • May the (labour) force be with you

    In school, the majority of my friends’ moms had the same occupation as mine did – “housewife” – so it never occurred to me that this was anything but an acceptable norm. This did change over time later on, as my sense on gender equality developed, but there was relatively…

  • Demographic divid-end

    NYT had a nice piece recently on (the entirely statistical phenomenon of) India overtaking China in population. All their graphs are worth pondering over, but I’ve always been fascinated by this one: Growing up in the 2000s, I remember seeing an entirely different prediction. Those were the heady days of…

  • Port-ly business

    The best take (by far) I’ve seen on the Adani-Hindenberg fiasco is by NYU’s Aswath Damodaran in his recent blog post. TL;DR – he argues that the main takeaways from this story should be the inherent failings of the Indian business and financial worlds, rather than something specific to Adani…

  • Cry me a river

    A recent UN study projected that India could be the most populous country as early as next year. Around the same time, the results of a national survey were released, showing that fertility rates have dropped just below replacement rate for the first time. Both seem to be good news,…

  • The science is dismal

    A Twitter thread got me thinking about the widespread disagreement about how to respond to the covid pandemic, especially how it relates to “following the science”. From one perspective, it is hard to wrap one’s head around the idea that scientific and rational people can disagree so starkly on what…

  • Add wise

    I recently read a blog post of an interview with Arunava Sen, a Professor at ISI and one of my Master’s advisors. I also happened to stumble upon the chapter he wrote in the book published in his Princeton advisor’s honour, which was released at a conference in his name…

  • Economic entry barriers

    In a recent chat with Abhijit Banerjee (enabled by visit days of the university – and not because I have a direct line to Nobel laureates), he remarked to me that “economists aren’t great communicators of economic ideas, and great communicators of economic ideas are not economists”. He also went…

  • The MSQE advantage

    After yet another great PhD admit season for MSQE students, I’ve found myself wondering what enables ISI to keep placing its students so well. We’ve seen top 15 admits for three students, and two more have received top 30 offers; while this is quite normal for ISI, others, like DSE,…