2024 in Review

DALLAS FLOER: Hey everyone, this is Dallas, one of the producers of Ideas of India. Today I’ll be interviewing Shruti for our end-of-year episode. We’ll look back at key themes and episodes from the past year, address your listener questions, discuss our job market series, and share some questions from previous guests. 

On behalf of Shruti, myself, and the entire Ideas of India team, thank you for listening to the podcast this year. We’re excited to bring you more episodes in 2025. 

Hello, everyone. My name is Dallas Floer. I’m one of the producers of “Ideas of India.” This is our end-of-year retrospective episode where I chat with Shruti about the year of episodes, a bit about the Job Market Series, and where she answers your listener questions. 

This year, we are also including a new segment where I will ask Shruti questions from some of the guests that we’ve had on the show this year, mainly surrounding questions or topics that Shruti and they maybe didn’t get a chance to cover in their episode or personal questions for Shruti. I’m excited to see what our guests have been thinking about. 

Shruti, thanks for doing this.

SHRUTI RAJAGOPALAN: Thanks, Dallas. This is the most fun episode for me because it means the least amount of prep, and you do all the work, and it’s always a joy to chat with you. This is an enormous amount of fun.

Listener Questions

FLOER: Absolutely. All right, we’re going to start with listener questions. We had a large turnout this year. People are submitting questions, which [I’m] happy to see.

RAJAGOPALAN: I’m leaving more questions unanswered than answered on the podcast. Yes, that’s a mixed bag.

FLOER: First, just a fun one. Alice Evans, past guest, friend of the show, and listener, she wants to know how you became so awesome, putting you on the spot.

RAJAGOPALAN: I love Alice. This is going to sound like this ridiculous mutual admiration club, but Alice Evans is one of my most favorite people because she is so awesome. She’s also an Emergent Ventures winner. I really follow her work. 

How did I become so awesome? I think it’s because I read and hang out with lots of fun people like Alice and other awesome EV winners, Mercatus scholars, all of you. Surround yourself with awesome people, and some of it will rub off on you. That’s my story.

FLOER: I was going to say the same thing, just get awesome people around you, and you will definitely turn out awesome.

RAJAGOPALAN: All my friends and acquaintances and everyone I work with, they’re quite phenomenal in whatever it is that they do.

Essential readings on the Indian economy

FLOER: Anish Chawri, he wants you to recommend three essential readings on the Indian economy, preferably books.

RAJAGOPALAN: Essential is really hard, but there are some books I find super useful about the Indian economy. I really like Arvind Panagariya’s, I think it’s called “The Emerging Giant.” That’s a really good book. It gives you a very good sense of India over the last 70 years or so. 

I really like this book by Tirthankar Roy and Anand Swamy called “Law and the Economy.” We discussed the first part of that book on the podcast when they came on the show, which was, I think, Law and the Economy in Colonial India. Now they’ve done the follow-up, and it’s coming out as one big book. I think that’s a really good one. 

I like Ajay Shah and Vijay Kelkar’s book, “In Service of the Republic.” I think that was the first episode we ever did on the podcast. That’s a great book. 

Another really fun book—this is now getting into the weeds of some geeky stuff that we do—I love Arun Shourie’s “Governance.” This is a book which just, it’s like a Yes Minister show in book form. Arun Shourie was also a journalist, other than being an economist. He writes the journey of all the bureaucracy and red tape and the craziness that he had to encounter when he was the Minister of Disinvestment. That’s a super fun book. I guess these are some of the books I recommend.

FLOER: Basically, anyone who’s come on the podcast who’s written a book.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, that, too. Not all of them are on the Indian economy, though, but yes.

FLOER: Sure.

RAJAGOPALAN: This year we’ve had some. Like Karthik Muralidharan has written this enormous book. Those are not just strictly the Indian economy. I was trying to be a little bit more broad, but yes, anyone who’s come on the show, they’ve written awesome books.

The economy of eastern India from 1970 to today

FLOER: All right, Saikat Lahiri. They had two questions, “What happened to the economy of eastern India from the ‘70s? A thriving industrial belt with a major hub of commerce and education in Kolkata decayed over five decades. What can we do to come back? Is the recent growth in Odisha an omen or an aberration? I am curious if you can discuss the east economy more comprehensively.”

RAJAGOPALAN: That’s a good question. This is a weird thing about India. There’s been a lot of discussion about the eastern economy in colonial times because that was the first area where the East India Company really set up. The Calcutta presidency was the first presidency, and Bihar, Bengal, Odisha became the first states to come under colonial rule. I think up to the ‘70s, there was just a massive amount of literature starting with stuff that colonial scholars wrote and postcolonial scholars wrote that was so focused on the east.

Actually, Saikat is right. I think in the last 30 years, we haven’t seen that much come out of that region. Some of it is because of deindustrialization. I think there’s no question about that. I think the bigger issue is these are states that have not done a very good job when it comes to economic growth. I’ll leave Odisha out of it because it’s been one of the fastest-growing states in recent times. UP, Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand have not grown that fast, if I take the 50-year view. I think that’s part of the reason economists have not paid much attention to it because when economies are not dynamic, there’s not that much to discuss. 

Where did they go wrong? I think it’s because they didn’t invest in their human and physical capital. That’s the easy, lazy answer. It’s a good question. I should think about it more. Maybe I’ll find some books and papers on this and have some scholars come chat with us.

Achieving a “Developed India”

FLOER: Saikat, their second question, they submitted this—I was watching—like two hours after their first one, so they were thinking. “Can all of India be like Kerala, still low–middle income but with an HDI of a very high–middle-income country? If not, why? If so, how? Why should we not aspire to that instead of Viksit Bharat?”

RAJAGOPALAN: Viksit Bharat means “Developed India.” That’s the English translation of that.

FLOER: Okay, thank you.

RAJAGOPALAN: I think it’s difficult for all of India to be like Kerala or at least get the same human development index outcomes, mainly because those outcomes are so tightly linked to GDP, and GDP growth, and GDP per capita. You have Bihar, which is still at sub-Saharan levels. Expecting—despite the lack of economic growth and dynamism—for those areas to be as developed as Kerala would be an enormous stretch. I think if the idea of Viksit Bharat is just that India needs to grow economically, it needs to grow the size of the pie, I think it’s hard to do it without it. 

In what universe can we make it happen? I think the biggest problem is if you have a model of the world where you take from Kerala and you give to Bihar, just like in the United States, Dallas, you take from the richer states, you take from New York, and you will give to, I don’t know, New Mexico or something. The trouble is you start relying a lot on intergovernmental transfers. Intergovernmental transfers automatically skew all the incentives. Now, the incentives of the subnational local governments are to appease the bureaucrats and appease the politicians at the federal level to get that transfer, as opposed to focusing on what the people of their state really want, right? 

I think some model of intergovernmental transfers but dramatically federalizing and localizing to the smallest unit may give you slightly better outcomes. Maybe if they really work hard, India as a whole decides that its only priority is education and health and nothing else, and that’s what we’re going to do for the next 15 years. Maybe we’ll get similar outcomes. Without economic growth, it’s very hard to even run that sort of program because you need government revenues. I don’t know. 

Plus, I don’t know if I want it to become like Kerala. Kerala’s economy is stagnated. It’s living off of transfers coming in from abroad because a lot of the Kerala workforce actually works outside of Kerala in another country. I think Tamil Nadu would be a better model but very, very hard to do without economic growth. Economic growth should be the number one thing we care about. I’m not sure if that’s what we mean by Viksit Bharat. 

FLOER: That’s your interpretation.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. I really don’t know what. Different economists and politicians, including Prime Minister Modi, they’ve all given different ideas or definitions of what they mean by Viksit Bharat. For me, it would just be economic growth. No substitute for that.

Alternate paths for economic students

FLOER: Next, Anonymous wants to know, “Too many early-career, enthusiastic, and highly motivated economic students that are seeking impact join the RCT sphere and end up in the academic pipeline. Do you think that this is good for development? How can we create better systems and aspirations for early-career development problem solvers?”

RAJAGOPALAN: Well, I think factually, yes. I think there are too many people who are doing RCTs. I don’t have a problem with RCTs as a method. I think that’s totally fine. I think the problem is if we expect development outcomes to come out of RCTs. I think that’s where we run into trouble. We shouldn’t kid ourselves into thinking that RCTs are going to find us some magic silver bullet or some particular scheme that will lead India out of poverty.

I think we need to focus more on the old-school macro development - trade, fiscal policy, health and education policy, that kind of stuff, which we just don’t see enough of. Is this good for development? No. Is this good for econ? No. 

How do we create better systems for early-career development scholars? I think just incubation. We need more appointments. We need more flexibility as opposed to the very rigid tenure track system we have here. We need more postdocs. We need more think tanks that can absorb these scholars and put them in touch with the real world or policymakers. EV tries to do a bit of this, and EV also supports other institutions that do a bit of this, but it just needs to happen at a much bigger scale.

The overinvestment in RCTs is because of the political economy of [the] American publication and tenure system, which is so focused on the top five or top ten journals, where you solve a particular kind of identification problem by doing an RCT instead of some kind of macro dev paper. That’s where this nonsense is coming from. Maybe also demoting those people in status would be good, and elevating people who do big-picture questions, but without a very specific narrow, causal answer, that would also be good.

FLOER: Has it become easier for people who are academics who don’t want to go down that tenure track to do something different? Because I feel like I hear all the time [that] people are trapped in tenure or that’s their goal. It’s still a good goal technically, but is there more opportunity for different things? Do people still hear about it? I feel like there might be a gap that we’re not hitting.

RAJAGOPALAN: In terms of opportunity, especially if you have an economics PhD, you’ll make more money in the private sector, right? The econ PhD market always clears because there’s a very large market outside the academic market. Amazon has an Office of the Chief Economist, which hires lots of economists, Uber, every major firm in the world. I’m not even including the government and the Fed and the FTC. The number of opportunities is enormous.

I don’t think the problem is one of opportunity. I think the problem is one of what is considered high status and low status. When students are doing their PhD, a lot of their self-worth is tied to what they’re working on and the outcome of what they’re working on. I’m not kidding. I’ve heard students tell me that they took a private sector job, and their academic advisor will no longer speak with them, or none of their PhD friends hang out with them anymore because they exited the system. Some of it is organic like you don’t see each other in the conference circuit, or you don’t have reason to keep in touch as much, but a lot of it is quite explicit. It’s like, “Okay, now you’re not part of the system. You’re of no real value to us, so please leave.”

I think that is the reason a lot of people feel like there isn’t enough opportunity because quitting that academic pipeline and doing something completely different is not just the loss of a dream you might have had in your first or second year of PhD, it’s actually just loss of an entire life, which you knew as a young adult in your 20s for six, seven, eight years. I think that’s the bigger problem. 

We need to elevate the status of these other jobs, and we need to demote the status of these people who are very obsessed with a particular pecking order or class system in academia. It never bothered me particularly, but I know it bothers a lot of other people.

FLOER: It makes sense because you basically lose your community.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, and your self-worth. That’s slightly harder.

FLOER: Yeah, not ideal. Just someone who’s not an academic, I would think, oh, if you go and work for Uber, even as an academic, an economist, I still think if you work for Uber, you’re set. If you enjoy the work then it’s like, “What’s the problem?”

RAJAGOPALAN: You’re doing awesome work. I think that’s the bigger thing.

The problem is, from the point of view of the advisors—not to defend the system—but they invest a lot in every PhD student. It’s very expensive for a university to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees and in stipends over a five-, six-, seven-year period because the PhDs are getting longer. I think from that point of view, there is some system to make sure the group stays in line, but I don’t know how to solve it. I do know that expanding the size of the pie, making all these other jobs high-status, I think that’s a good start.

Suggested dissertation topics for PhD students 

FLOER: Speaking of PhDs, another anonymous listener wants to know, “If you would start your PhD today, what would be your potential dissertation topics?”

RAJAGOPALAN: The advice I give doctoral students is, do what you are really excited about because you have to keep that excitement up for four, five, six years. Sometimes that particular paper may not get published for another few years. I remember it took seven, eight years to get my job market paper published. Just pick something that a year from today when you’re working on it, you’re not like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe I picked this topic. It’s coming out of my eyes and ears. I hate it. I hate my life.” That’s the advice.

Having said that, I also have this feeling that we should work on really big-ticket items during our doctoral work, right? What are the big-ticket items of today? You have immigration. That’s the big $20 bill lying on the sidewalk. We have air pollution. I think that’s a really big one, especially in the Global South. We have AI. These are big global topics. 

In India, I think delimitation is a really big one. This is basically how India’s going to reassign its parliamentary constituencies to account for population. That’s, I think, a very big-ticket item. I think migration flows within India because India is like a continent, so it has countries. The top 12 states in India would find themselves as countries within the top 50 biggest countries of the world. India’s enormous. I think interstate flows, intrastate migration, I think those are big things to study. Air pollution in India is huge. In India, I think we still need work on all your macro dev questions, fiscal policy, monetary policy, trade policy.

These are just things that there’s so much work that is yet to be done. Lots of stuff on law and economics. That’s how I started my career working on law and economics and the Constitution. I would write the same dissertation again today because I just enjoyed doing it. It’s hard to say.

FLOER: That’s good because you took your own advice, essentially.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, I took my own advice, and I don’t think I regretted it. Sometimes it got a bit boring. By the time you get to the 12th revision of a paper and revise and resubmit and page proofs, you just want to stab yourself. It is a long academic pipeline. 

I’m also listing topics where there’s a deep bench of papers to be written. It’s not a one cute question paper and done kind of thing. There are lots of questions to ask. I also think a curious mind can make an interesting dissertation out of anything.

FLOER: The topics you were talking about, you can segment into basically anything.

RAJAGOPALAN: Anything.

FLOER: Another anonymous listener wants to know, what are the under-researched and over-researched questions on the Indian economy?

RAJAGOPALAN: I think the under-researched questions are some of the things that I listed. I don’t think there’s enough work that’s happening today on trade. I don’t think there’s enough work happening within India migration or air pollution. 

I think the overstudied questions are the usual like, do we really need one more evaluation of one more government scheme without understanding the broader political economy context in which that scheme was created or it exists in? I seem to see a hundred upon a hundred papers on this. It’s terrible. 

I think we need to have a better grip on China. I think the Indian literature on how Indians perceive China is woefully slim. It’s very narrow. I think a few bureaucrats and some very senior diplomats have written books. There isn’t much of an academic literature there, and I think we should get on it. 

Those would be my big ones. I would repeat the ones I mentioned in the previous answer as still the under-researched questions. Let’s just stop doing RCTs evaluating one more cute government project. If I never read a paper like that again, I would not be unhappy.

Revising stances on COVID shutdowns

FLOER: Yes, exactly. Pravin wants to know, “Do you regret calling for the Indian government to shut down its economy in the face of COVID, knowing well its lack of state capacity?”

RAJAGOPALAN: This is complicated. I do regret calling for the shutdown, and oddly, it’s not because of state capacity. It is a completely different reason. In my defense, when I had first written about [how] India needs to lock itself down for a few weeks, I think I explicitly said a few weeks. That would’ve meant two to three weeks. This was Feb, March, 2020. There was no vaccine in sight. We didn’t know enough about COVID. 

The point of that policy advice was, we need to shut down. India hardly has any testing capacity. It had one apex testing place. For a billion people, you need lots of testing centers. You need hundreds and thousands of testing centers. The idea was South Korean style, let’s ninja these testing centers. For a couple of weeks, let’s close down. Once we have the testing centers up and running, then it’s going to be much easier to keep business as usual because, without testing, you don’t know who should isolate. Without that, this just spreads too quickly, which we did see across the world. That was the point of it, right, not to defend myself. 

It was outside the realm of my imagination that the government would, [first], lockdown for 70 to 100 days and, second, that it would be so stringent. Oddly enough, the reason I said it wasn’t because of state capacity was because I didn’t think India had the state capacity to do it, nor did I think Indians would follow it, to be very honest. That’s the part I regret. 

The regret is not calling for the lockdown because it’s not like the government saw my column and said, “Yes, Shruti said lockdown, so let’s do it badly.” My regret is more along the lines of, “Wow, I really didn’t know my government and my people well enough to anticipate this.” I genuinely did not imagine a scenario where Indians would quietly be at home and follow these crazy, crazier, craziest diktats coming from the police and the central government. It was really nothing I could have imagined. I would have thought someone’s writing a bad sci-fi dystopian novel if you had told me this in 2019. That genuinely surprised me. 

I’ve revised my opinion of how obedient Indians are to central government diktats. This is a very large number of people. We didn’t see riots on the streets. We didn’t see anything crazy happening. We didn’t see huge clashes with the police when the police were enforcing these lockdowns or bans. When I think back, I still think it’s extraordinary that that’s how the government acted and that’s how the people reacted. That’s my regret. I have now changed my mind on just how much stress the government is willing to put on people and how much people are willing to tolerate. 

The second part of that regret is, I should have had a hint of this because when India did demonetization, Indians quietly stood in long lines at banks to switch their currency. Again, no riots, no drama, no mass protests. You do something like this in Latin America and in three days you’ll see people take to the streets. I think I just need to revise my model of how the Indians view their own state and how the state views its own people, more like subjects and things to be moved around. That’s, I guess, my regret.

FLOER: I think it’s more of a lesson. I think “regret” is a harsh term, just mainly around COVID. I think people were making the best-informed decisions they could and making the best calls that they could.

RAJAGOPALAN: True, but I honestly think it’s totally fine to call people out when they’re wrong. This is the job.

FLOER: That’s how you learn.

RAJAGOPALAN: Exactly. This is the job of public intellectuals. If you got something wrong, the very least one can do is say, “Hey, we called this wrong,” and if possible, do some introspection on why we called it wrong. I’m not very offended by someone asking me to be regretful.

FLOER: Oh, yes. No, I think people are maybe more hard on themselves with COVID stuff, just because of how long it actually did take for everything to “get back to normal” and what they were calling or talking about early on and it being wrong or right. That’s my perspective.

RAJAGOPALAN: Again, I don’t fancy myself as having any serious influence on the government’s scope of lockdown decisions, but there is something to be said here. I think typically what happens is the government wants to do something and then maybe they think about, “Hey, what are people saying about this?” If there are a bunch of elites saying, “You should lock down because Italy is running out of coffins,” then that might be taken a little bit more seriously. I think in that sense, public intellectuals should do introspection with some serious regret and responsibility as if their words were used to make that policy decision or inform that policy decision.

FLOER: Have weight to them.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, though I don’t think mine did. I definitely don’t take responsibility for that horrible lockdown, nor did I recommend that version of it, but yes, I do feel bad about this, that I just missed it. It’s like a personal failing of having a misunderstanding of a country I study so deeply.

Problematic TV news programs in India

FLOER: Sure. No, I get that. Pramod Biligiri, they have two questions. “Why are TV news programs so broken? Especially in India, if newspapers can give you a nice summary of the day’s news, how come not a single TV program can do the same?”

RAJAGOPALAN: First, he’s right. TV cable news in India.

FLOER: In the US it’s also awful.

RAJAGOPALAN: No, but the US has seizure-inducing noise levels and amounts of information on the ticker and stuff like that; India has heart-attack-inducing levels. It’s just ridiculous. If you see Indian TV news channels, I promise you if you were measuring your brain and your blood pressure activity, it would all just spike because you have six boxes with people talking—faces and shouting—and then there are four or five tickers, every corner of the screen as well. I think I do agree with him. It’s terrible.

I think the reason it’s terrible has to do with government licensing. I don’t remember the specifics, but I do remember reading about this. The way we license TV and radio channels is they need to apply for a license and pay pretty high licensing fees and get permission before they can launch a channel.

Second, if I’m not wrong, the licensing fee for news channels is higher than it is for something else like children’s cartoons, or devotional music, or something like that.

Because of these two things, entry is very difficult. Anyone who can manage entry by paying these very high fees and having the clout to get a license now needs to recover that money, which means they need to pander to a very broad audience, and they need people glued to the TV all day long, right? The capsule version of it is almost self-defeating because if you gave all the information nicely in a capsule over a couple of episodes during the day, then why would people watch it the rest of the time? 

Newspapers are different because a lot of the good ones have a subscription model and not just an ad revenue model. I subscribe to the FT. It’s one of the best-written papers. I subscribe to Bloomberg. They get to the point so quickly. Everything is done so well. They also have a ticker, but it doesn’t cause any seizures or headaches.

I don’t think that’s a feasible revenue model for Indian TV channels. If you want Indian TV channels to get better, I think the first thing to do is just dismantling the licensing system and dramatically reducing the price or the cost of the license so that entry becomes easier. If you’ve noticed, Pramod, a lot of the TV news anchors who were flushed out of traditional TV journalism, like Barkha Dutt, who’s been on the show, or Ravish Kumar, they started YouTube channels because it’s hard for them to get their own license. I do think we have capsules. They’ve just moved on to the internet and streaming, and you’re not going to find it on TV, unfortunately.

FLOER: I had no idea, so thank you for explaining that.

RAJAGOPALAN: Oh my God. I hope you never watch an Indian News channel. Dallas. 

FLOER: Maybe one day.

RAJAGOPALAN: As a producer, you will be so horrified at what people are producing. We will keep this secret from you.

Predicting the economic impact of AI

FLOER: I would be overstimulated pretty easily, probably. Pramod’s second question is, “Can you recommend some good economics-based analyses of the impact of generative AI? I can see that it makes certain things very fast and cheap, but how would that impact the rest of the value chain?”

RAJAGOPALAN: Very hard to say. Honestly, it’s just too soon to say. I don’t have a good sense of how it will impact the value chain. The reason I am not making any predictions is I’ve lived through the internet age, right?

FLOER: Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: I know how long it took for certain things to happen. Email happened pretty quickly, but it took a good 10, 12 years to get maps or navigation, and then it took a good 20 years to get Uber. The pipeline sometimes takes longer, not because the core internet service was badly designed. It’s just so many other things need to happen for an Uber kind of service to come through because everyone needs to have a smartphone. You need to have a navigation system. You need to have payments that can happen seamlessly, which means it has to be a sophisticated enough economy to have digital payments, not just card or cash payments. So many things had to come together for a service like that to happen. 

I think it’s going to be quite similar for AI. I think the core technology is going to get better and better. I think the specialized technologies and integrations—it’s just very hard to predict which sectors they’ll happen first.

The person who I’ve read who is pretty useful on this is Anton Korinek. He’s an economist. I think he has a paper in the Journal of Economic Literature and a couple of other working papers. I think that might be useful to read. 

I recently heard our colleague, Robin Hanson, did a really good podcast called “Awakening the Machine,” where he talks about the future of AI. Robin, one of the smartest people on this, talks about when and how we will know if we [have] singularity and what kind of insurance markets can solve for that. Robin’s always super useful to learn from. I’m sorry, I’m not giving a very good answer to this question, but it’s just hard.

FLOER: There’s a lot that we don’t know about AI still.

RAJAGOPALAN: Just stay tuned and keep reading would be my answer to the question.

FLOER: Things are changing in AI literally every day. 

The South Korean chaebol model

All right, last question from listeners. Sai wants to know, “Is the South Korea chaebol model a legitimate way to build competitive economies? Do you think that tech monopolies are harmful to nations across the world?”

RAJAGOPALAN: I’ll take the first part of the question first. Chaebols are these big monopolistic conglomerates that were supported by the state [which] made them international champions and things like that. When I think about the reason South Korea succeeded, chaebols are not the core part of that story. They’re part of the story, but the reason South Korea succeeded is they made their economy incredibly competitive. The way they made their economy incredibly competitive is by embracing global trade—having low tariffs and making sure every single thing that they produce faces global competition so that they can one day be good enough for export markets. That’s how they develop. 

Now we’ve seen that story play out in many different countries. The biggest example is China. But I think the reason the South Korean chaebols are an important part there is [that] it’s a relatively small country. Maybe smaller countries can’t have six different firms doing some things which require very high technology or very high fixed investments. Maybe it’s just easier to have conglomerate effects where the state is sort of backing or backstopping a national champion. That might make it easier in a smaller country. If it had to compete with, let’s say, China on certain things, maybe having that chaebol model helped. Even then, I’m skeptical, I don’t think that’s the core part of the South Korean success story. 

The second part, “Do you think tech monopolies are harmful to nations?” It depends on the kind of monopoly. When we look at the history of antitrust and anti-monopoly court cases and lawsuits, the biggest cases from 10 years ago, those companies are no longer the monopolists or the leaders in that area. Pick every 10 years, who was the biggest target of the DOJ, and 10, 15 years from now, they were not. Either they don’t exist, or they don’t exist in the same form. 

When I was in law school, IBM cases were the stuff that we were studying because that was the heyday. In law school, you study things with a five- or six-year lag, right? You’re not studying in real time. When I was in law school, it was really Microsoft. They were all going after Microsoft. Then it was Google. In 10 years, Google is not going to dominate search. I think in three years, Google is not going to dominate search. It’ll be some new technology, some AI-based Perplexity kind of thing that will dominate search. 

These monopolies come and go. They weaken, they morph. IBM doesn’t have a monopoly in the things that people said it had a monopoly X number of years ago. I would take that with a pinch of salt. Big tech will also go away, so I’m not too worried.

FLOER: Speaking of monopolies, I was just thinking about this the other day. Uber is now letting taxis be Uber. What do you think about that?

RAJAGOPALAN: I think that’s awesome, right? Let’s back up a little bit. The thing about monopolies is the idea is locked into a very traditional physical world where switching costs are very high. If there’s one kind of, let’s say, orange juice that has a monopoly or has a very large market share, the idea was, it can abuse its dominance. It’s going to strike all these interesting deals with all these retail chains. Even though there’s more than one type of orange juice, they will get the best shelf placement, which is going to reinforce the fact that people buy them, which means they’re going to get a bigger market share, right? This was the old-school thinking, which means they’re not just competing on price anymore or they’re competing too much on price because Walmart will give them the best deal and the best placement, something like that. 

Another fear was the kind of bundling, so the printer and the cartridge bundling because the cartridge is not interoperable across printers of different firms, which means if you buy a particular kind of printer, you’re forced to buy their cartridge. The printer comes relatively cheap; the cartridge is priced at some extraordinary price. 

These were the concerns that people had. Now, in digital goods, it’s ridiculous to have this concern. I have at least three mobile ride-sharing apps on my phone.

FLOER: Yes, same.

RAJAGOPALAN: And I’m not including my own car, or the Metro, or public transport buses in that, or taxis. I’m literally just talking about ride sharing. I think there is Uber, Lyft, and Empower, which serves our area, and I happen to have all three apps on my phone. The switching costs are negligible. I typically have both apps open at the same time when I’m in a hurry, or when there’s a surge price, or if it’s raining. It’s a bit ridiculous to compare the two. 

Most of the drivers I see, I see this more in India, they have multiple apps. They are drivers with Uber and Lyft and the local Ola app or whatever. When both the consumer and the service provider are all having very low switching costs, I have no idea why we’re freaking out about monopolies. It just makes no sense. If Uber’s giving better driver incentives to the drivers but the drivers are still looking between three apps, then guess who got suckered into this bad deal. It’s not us; it’s Uber. It’s not going to stay in the market too long. Most of the drivers figured it out pretty quickly. They said, “Uber gives great starter incentives, and then those incentives disappear.” People are not stupid on either side of the market. 

I think the advantages Uber has, honestly, is just name recognition. When I land in a new city, I open the Uber app because I don’t know what is the Lyft or the Empower equivalent in, say, Hamburg or pick another city. I think that’s where some of the advantages come in. We’re talking about like 2% of the population that travels and takes an Uber when they land in a new city. That’s not exactly moving this market. I think it’s overblown.

FLOER: No, it’s interesting.

RAJAGOPALAN: I agree with you. We have a couple of papers on this. Shreyas wrote a paper on competition law in India and how badly the Competition Commission of India regulates this stuff. We also wrote a note on the new framework. I just want to plug my awesome research with my awesome colleague, Shreyas.

FLOER: All right. Well, that was all the listeners’ questions. Thank you, listeners, who submitted your questions.

RAJAGOPALAN: Thanks so much. Some of the names are familiar because you guys also write to me, and you tweet to me. The folks who are anonymous, guys, your questions were awesome. Next time, put your name on it.

FLOER: Don’t be scared.

RAJAGOPALAN: I’d love to know you.

Top Episodes of the Year

FLOER: Let’s move on to top episodes of the year. Is there anyone on the top list that you were surprised by, or was this basically exactly what you expected?

RAJAGOPALAN: I have no idea.

FLOER: You have no idea?

RAJAGOPALAN: I never have any idea. I’m not surprised. The top people listed that Dallas handed me before we started recording is Karthik Muralidharan, Aparna Chandra, Tom Easton, and Arjun Ramani, and Ruchir Sharma, and all five of them are fantastic people. Those were great episodes. We got a lot of feedback. Karthik is really one of the most famous economists in India and one of the most prominent development economists across the world. I’m not at all surprised by this list. Ruchir Sharma is a columnist for The Financial Times. These people are superstars, so not at all surprised.

FLOER: I will say that Ruchir was an honorable mention, and I’ll get to why he was an honorable mention when we get to his episode, but we can go back to Karthik, who was number one. His episode was titled The State of the Indian State. Naturally, many things were covered in this episode, but there was one section where you pushed Karthik a little bit to be more ambitious in reimagining state capacity beyond just streamlining existing systems. What additional reforms would you prioritize in personnel management that weren’t fully explored in his book?

Karthik Muralidharan: reimagining state capacity 

RAJAGOPALAN: I want to first step back and just tell you the lens through which I see Karthik’s framework. I have no disagreement with him that the government of India at the state level and the local levels are just so full of inefficiencies that streamlining these systems will get us huge gains, especially in personnel management, so on that, I’m not quibbling with him. 

The way Karthik sets up the problem is this is something we need to do right at the top. Maybe have the Union Government figure out how to streamline something and then the state government figure out how to streamline things that go further down. Second, other than the top-down part of it, it’s also like the Union Government has to do these centralized exams that are going to pick people and create a roster, and then the states can choose from [the roster]. 

All these are great ideas, but there is another way of doing this, which is not so top down, which is dramatically federalize and localize such that local people know their problems the best. They know whether they need a bilingual school teacher or they need a polylingual school teacher or they only need to speak one language. No one can know that better than the people in that particular village.

I think I was pushing Karthik on this because Karthik’s also a fabulous public finance guy. At Mason, we are public finance, public choice, federalism people. My sort of push was, hey, we need to figure out a fiscally federal system where the feedback comes from the bottom. That is, you’re more accountable to the people who you’re serving rather than the people who are setting up these commissions or people who are streamlining things at the top, which is not to say his ideas are bad, but that’s where I was going with it.

FLOER: An analogy that I think about with this is sometimes video game developers won’t play their own game, and you can sometimes tell really clearly if they haven’t played the game. I think it’s important that you need to put yourself in those shoes if you’re going to be creating something from the ground up, essentially.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. I believe a lot of the video games got developed through these focus groups of these super uber-mega players. These young kids are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to try out new games and give the feedback. I do think the feedback mechanism gets broken if you don’t have fiscal federalism. Fiscal federalism is the big-ticket item that I would push Karthik to think about more.

Aparna Chandra: institutional checks on judicial bias

FLOER: Sure. Moving on to Aparna’s episode.

RAJAGOPALAN: Oh, yes. That was fabulous.

FLOER: Yes. This one was titled, Puts the Supreme Court on Trial. The conversation highlighted how chief justices avoid dissent through strategic bench assignments. Given your view that this represents intentional rather than accidental bias, what institutional checks could effectively constrain this power while preserving the judicial independence?

RAJAGOPALAN: Normally, when you ask a question that’s this specific and narrow, the law and economics person in me would give you a very specific rule change. Like, “Let’s do this minor rule change and this problem will go away.” The Indian Supreme Court, I am afraid, is just a hot mess, as Aparna has also pointed out in her book. There’s just a mountain of literature on this now. I think we need to go back to the drawing board and redesign how we appoint judges. I think that’s the beginning of the problem. If we fix that, it will also fix many of the downstream issues such as how benches are designed, or the master of the roster, who’s the Supreme Court Chief Justice, and so on. 

I think first up, the way the Indian higher judiciary is currently functioning, it’s almost self-appointing because it’s a collegium, which is pretty much only the judiciary members who will decide who else gets to join that club. However, the executive has a kind of a secret veto. They can just refuse to move the file. The court will send these things to the law ministry. The law ministry will just sit on a file. Technically, under the system that the Supreme Court devised, they made themselves self-appointing, but the executive needs to actually make the appointments. That’s how the executive is controlling the judiciary right now.

Which is why we have the most recent chief justice of India who’s had this very mixed legacy. He has been accused of pandering too much to the government sometimes, and sometimes doing too little pandering at other times, depending on who you ask. I think we need to fix that. We just need to rethink, “Hey, the executive is always going to have a role in appointment. Why don’t we just create a better panel to pick better judges?”

I think it would help if judges had longer terms, then their reputation costs will start mattering, because right now, I think the average tenure of a Supreme Court Chief Justice is two years and change because they get elevated from the high courts. That’s pretty bad. If you were there for a longer time, you would have personal reputation costs and the legacy you’re leaving behind. 

I think we should increase the retirement age to 70. I think we should ban them from taking any remunerative appointment post their term. I think we should definitely have a better panel with the executive parliament leaders of opposition and a couple of senior judiciary members to actually appoint the judges. The list is too long, and I think then some of the minor downstream problems that we see will go away.

Arjun Ramani and Thomas Easton: critical reforms to maintain growth

FLOER: Yeah. Number three was the episode with Tom Easton and Arjun Ramani. They largely relied on this podcast and Shruti’s other work on India to create this report at The Economist. That’s what they discussed in their episode, which—that’s lovely. I forgot to mention too that Karthik also referenced “Ideas of India” in his book. The podcast is doing its job. 

Both Tom and Arjun seemed cautiously optimistic about India’s short-term prospects while raising concerns about the long-term structural reforms. In your view, what are the two to three critical reforms needed in Modi’s third term to maintain growth momentum beyond just the next five years?

RAJAGOPALAN: First, before I answer your question, I’ve been reading The Economist since I was a teenager. My dad had a subscription. I think the whole year got made when the podcast was mentioned in The Economist as one of the references. My dad was like, “Oh, my God, this is it. You have officially made it.” Thanks to Tom and Arjun for featuring that. The report is fantastic. It’s a six-chapter report where both of them have written about different aspects of the Indian economy.

I share their cautious optimism on this. I’m still very bullish on India, but cautious just because the speed of reforms is not what it used to be, nor is the quality as good as it used to be. I think we need to go back to the good old trade, embrace trade and liberalization. 

India liberalized in 1991, liberalized for about 20 years, and between 2011 and 2020, up to COVID, kind of pulled a slight U-turn on liberalization. Tariffs started going back up. I think now, they’re going to be on their way down, especially in the second Trump term. Who knows what’s in store for us? That, I think, is still something we need to do. I would say just bring down tariffs to…pick a number, as I like to say. It doesn’t matter what the tariff is, as long as it’s low, and it’s the same across the board to avoid all these rent-seeking problems and policy uncertainty, regime-uncertainty problems. I think that’s one. 

Factor market reforms, we’ve been doing a lot of work on that here at Mercatus. We’ve had amazing scholars like Anirudh Burman talk about land reforms. I’ve been writing about labor reforms with my excellent colleague, Kadambari Shah. I think factor market reforms are really important, and that is harder at the union government level because the states need to do it. You asked the question specific to [the] Modi government. I think he has less power there, but he can maybe incentivize states to get their act together and fiscal federalism again.

FLOER: That’s the theme today.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. That’s the theme. I’m very optimistic because Arvind Panagariya—who you know is a friend of the program at Mercatus Center, he’s done so much work with us on trade—he’s currently the chair of the finance commission in India. That’s the commission that’s responsible for recommending how the fiscal resources or the revenue is shared between the union government and the states.

I’m enormously hopeful that we will get more fiscal federalism coming out of this, because I think India is just too big and too complex to pin all the blame on the Modi government. I think states need to do much more of the heavy lifting, both in terms of reforms and also in provision of services.

Ruchir Sharma: the state of American capitalism

FLOER: Right. All right. Finally, our honorable mention. Ruchir, he’s an honorable mention because looking at the stats on the podcast apps, which is how I got the first three, he was pretty average. He did well, but when you look at YouTube…

RAJAGOPALAN: It just exploded.

FLOER: He exploded for whatever reason, and he has almost 5,000 listens or views on YouTube, just his episode alone.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. We get a few hundred on YouTube because we don’t put out the full video. This is mainly an audio show, and I understand why people wouldn’t watch it on a video app. Even I was very surprised to see that when you had put down that note. That’s incredible.

FLOER: Something in the algorithm picked it up for whatever reason, but that’s good for us. Ruchir argues that America’s current economic system has deviated significantly from its capitalist roots through expanding government intervention, yet remains relatively successful compared to Europe. Do you see this as evidence of capitalism’s resilience or a sign that we’ve redefined what successful capitalism means?

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, this is really tough. First, again, a huge fan of Ruchir Sharma. I’ve been reading his columns forever. I don’t mean to make all these people sound old or these publications sound old, but I have spent my life reading them. It was a huge thrill to meet him and have him on the show. 

The book is really fantastic and sort of prescient. He predicted what’s coming in the US. Even though the US is growing economically and is still dynamic when it comes to innovation and AI, just how much discontent there is among younger people, among minorities on just how expensive things are, how difficult it is to buy a home. The book is really fantastic, so I encourage everyone to read it. 

Why the US is doing better than Europe and other countries despite sharing some of the similar problems—very hard to say. I think it has to do with two things. One is scale—the scale that the US enjoys both because it’s the single largest global economy, but also the currency. The US is the reserve currency of the world, and the switching course of switching from that—something very dramatic has to happen. I think the US is able to withstand a lot more of its terrible policies because of these two reasons there. It enjoys a particular kind of scale, and it’s the global currency. 

I will say that the US has not thwarted its most efficient sectors with crazy overregulation. The US does have crazy overregulation. It’s impossible to build a five-story building with a new kind of elevator. It’s a nightmare. But it is still the best place for startups to come. It is relatively permissionless innovation, and it is relatively permissionless when it comes to scaling.

Europe, on the other hand, whether it’s its data laws, its digital privacy laws, its market access laws—it’s a regulatory nightmare. It reminds me of India during License Permit Raj. Even though lots of new firms start in Europe, they’re never able to scale in Europe because of the amount of money you need to scale. It’s very incumbent-friendly because incumbents would’ve already invested in the lawyers and the army of accountants and compliance managers that it takes to do that. I think that’s one major difference that I can point to, but the US better get its act together, as Ruchir said. Otherwise, we’re not going to enjoy this for too long.

The Job Market Series

FLOER: Besides our usual episodes, we also did our job market series. We had nine candidates. Did any of the research findings by the job market candidates surprise you?

RAJAGOPALAN: They’re all great researchers. First of all, people are awesome because they listen to us. I’m always surprised by the quality of the research. When I was on the job market, I was a bumbling mess. These people are so smart. They’re so polished. Their research is of such high quality. I’m always blown away by that. 

One thing that genuinely surprised me was Atanu Chatterjee’s dissertation. I love sociologists and geographers because they send the entire dissertation, which is so amazing. Normally, we just get to read a single job market paper.

Atanu’s work is on slum rehabilitation in Ahmedabad in Gujarat. Ahmedabad and Gujarat are the success stories when it comes to slum rehabilitation. Delhi is a disaster. You put out these tenders. The developers screw the government. They screw the people. The slum never gets built or rebuilt. People are displaced. It’s a corrupt nightmare. Ahmedabad is always put forth as this amazing success story where they actually manage to get the slum rebuilt and get the inhabitants moved back in. 

The amount of discontent, the number of coordination problems they were facing, just the unhappiness caused by the new kind of spatial organization when you move away from a slum into these high-rise low-income apartments, that genuinely surprised me. It genuinely surprised me that spatial dislocation can have such big impacts. Because to me, as someone who’s lived in good neighborhoods my whole life, the idea of exiting the slum would be so exciting. “Oh my God, finally, there’s piped water and the roof is not leaking, and it’s not diseased, and there isn’t open sewage running outside.” I would’ve thought that would be such a big thing, but the discontent related to all these other items, that surprised me. 

I’m still optimistic because he talked about the kind of participatory mechanisms and what the civil society and NGOs can do, how we can actually design this better. It seems like relatively low-hanging fruit, so I’m very optimistic, and that’s why his dissertation work is so important. But I was surprised by it.

FLOER: Just for me too reading it from not your lens but mine, I thought it made a lot of sense.

RAJAGOPALAN: He’s amazing. All of them are amazing. Not to pick one out. They all sent multiple papers. They’re all super productive. I know from past years’ experience, they all end up doing very well on the market. Pretty much everyone gets placed either in a postdoc or gets a tenure-track job pretty soon. I wish them all good luck, and they’ll all be back.

FLOER: Yes, they impress me every year.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, same.

Questions from Past Guests

FLOER: We’ll keep doing it. Let’s move on to our final segment, our new one, questions from past guests.

RAJAGOPALAN: Ooh, I love our guests.

FLOER: We had four people submit questions. Sajith Pai, he wants to know what were the one, two, or three most surprising takeaways, insights, factoids that stayed rent free in your head from all of the conversations that you had this past year.

RAJAGOPALAN: One of the factoids is actually from Sajith’s report. Sajith, I promise I’m not making this up just because it’s you, and you asked the question. In Sajith’s Indus Valley Report, they talk about the consumer base of India and they classify India as 1.4 billion people, but that still shows that about a billion Indians are earning incomes and consuming at Sub-Saharan African levels. That, to me, is still pretty incredible that that’s still how poor Indians are despite all the economic growth. I think the project for all of us working on India has got to be how to lift that group up. That’s a huge number, and that’s pretty staggering. 

What are some of the other factoids? This episode hasn’t released yet. This is with Anant Sudarshan, which is, I think, going to be our next episode, or maybe the one after that. I did not know that this pain medication called diclofenac - which is a pretty common anti-inflammatory medication that’s given for all sorts of muscle pains - the patent expired, and it made its way into veterinary medication. Giving diclofenac to cattle almost single-handedly destroyed India’s vulture population because of [the] collapse of vultures that can’t digest diclofenac, and it causes kidney failure.

That to me was like, “Oh, wow. I had no idea that there would be this crazy unintended consequence of this one patent expiring on this one medication, which is pretty safe for humans, it’s pretty safe for cattle, weirdly enough, it’s not safe for vultures.” We don’t give it to vultures, but they still faced this collapse because of it. That’s one weird thing. Please listen to Anant’s episode. It talks about the human lives lost because of the collapse of keystone species like vultures.

What are some of the other crazy factoids? I think the Ahmedabad one is pretty crazy. There were some crazy factoids from Aparna’s book and just how crazy the pendency is. How most of the cases that go on to the appellate level get overturned. It’s a coin toss. It’s not like lower courts are doing so badly, it’s just higher courts are opening up every case without much good reason. What are some of the other crazy factoids? Yes, I guess those are a couple of them.

FLOER: Yes, they’re interesting. I haven’t listened to Anant’s episode either because I haven’t gotten there, but…

RAJAGOPALAN: We just recorded it. I just read that paper. That’s why it’s so salient in my mind.

Shifting stances on schooling and drugs

FLOER: No, it’s interesting. Sajith also wants to know, “Has Shruti revisited a prior belief or assumption or two that she held deeply, and now a conversation or two is making her rethink that or made you revisit?”

RAJAGOPALAN: There are a couple. I’ve been thinking about this. I’ve always long held the view that education and really good public or private schooling is the way we change the fortunes of people, and we overcome the birth accident. In India, if we fix education, that’s going to change things enormously for people. I have been rethinking that a lot, mainly because of the research coming out on this. But intergenerational upward mobility, upward social mobility in general, and also at an intergenerational level—it’s a really hard puzzle to solve, not just in India, but across the world. 

I’ve been reading some of Jim Heckman’s research on this. He’s been working on the Scandinavian countries, especially Denmark, and Denmark has higher income mobility and things like that compared to the United States. They invest a lot more in education, but even his research finds that family background is so incredibly important in determining future outcomes or lifetime earnings and things like that. 

Family being that key, this may seem like a stupid thing to say, but I didn’t realize that there are just limits to education programs, welfare programs. Everything we throw at this problem, at some point, just family becomes such an enormous constraint. The birth accident is still well and alive because we don’t get to pick what families we are part of. I guess that is something I have quite significantly changed my mind or I’m open to changing my mind on. 

Another one is just substance abuse. In my teenage years, I was never into substance abuse. I don’t do anything stronger than coffee and chocolate. Coffee and chocolate and carbs are, I guess, my substances of choice to abuse.

FLOER: We’ll let those slide.

RAJAGOPALAN: I have always been very libertarian that adults can make their own decisions, and if people want to do drugs, let them do drugs. Legalize things so that it becomes much simpler, lower criminal activity, lower deadweight loss. I have been changing my mind on that, and I don’t know if it’s just because of this fentanyl and opioid epidemic we’re seeing in the US. 

I think the main reason I’m changing my mind is there are a lot of these things that are hard to reverse when it comes to substance abuse. The idea that you can switch and try things as an adult and then switch back painlessly when you realize it’s ruining your life—it’s not quite as straightforward and especially not in the modern-day world of synthetic drugs and opioids. It’s just crazy the kind of stuff that’s getting produced that can kill you with one dose, that can get you extremely addicted on a couple of doses. 

I think this is another one. Again, I don’t know what I’ve changed my mind to. Maybe we don’t legalize fentanyl, obviously. I still don’t know if that means we should criminalize or ban alcohol or marijuana or something. I do feel a lot more squeamish about my old libertarian stance on this.

FLOER: I think drug abuse is hard because the person who is on drugs has to make that choice to be like, “I don’t want to be on drugs anymore.” But, the drugs may have, and I don’t know this for sure, but the drugs might have altered their ability to make that choice.

RAJAGOPALAN: Exactly. Ability to make that choice.

FLOER: You are giving people these opportunities to potentially get clean and lead a better life after that, but that initial step still needs to happen, and it’s harder and harder for that to happen, especially if the person is surrounded by people who aren’t pushing them to get help.

RAJAGOPALAN: Again, you are just trapped in bad environments sometimes. I also think they have this massive social cost and externality. There are entire cities and neighborhoods which have been devastated by these drug epidemics. It’s complicated. I don’t have my usual good libertarian economist answer for this, and I’m not able to rely on “let adults adult and make rational choices” as my alternative. I don’t know if government is the alternative. I will still say I am skeptical about how much government banning can get us out of these problems, but I think we just need something which is in between the two. Yes.

FLOER: I think that’s fair. It’s fine to not have the answer. Thinking about it is important nonetheless.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. I was very laissez-faire about adults wanting to do whatever they want. It’s totally fine.

FLOER: Sure. Karthik.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes.

Law and economics

FLOER: We’re bringing him back. He wants to know, “given that Shruti is one of the very few Indian economists who has a law degree, I’m curious to know if Shruti has designed a course on law and economics for Indian law schools. If not, I would strongly encourage her to create one and teach it to a top law school in India to get feedback and refine the course and then offer the syllabus. I think this is an incredible opportunity and incredibly important because most of the legal community has very little exposure to the ‘economic analysis of the law.’” He discussed the importance of this in chapter 14 of his book, but we didn’t cover it during your episode. Maybe you can contribute to this.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, because your book was huge, Karthik. Karthik is being very kind. He is right. Not too many people make so many mistakes in their life. I went to law school and got a PhD in economics. At least one of them was a mistake. To answer his question, I’ve taught a couple of modules to law professors introducing them to the topic and things like that, but I’ve never designed a full course. I have taught law and economics to American students, but I’ve not done it for India. Karthik, I accept the nudge. I will think about this more, and I will put together a reading list or something that makes sense, hopefully. Where’s the question?

FLOER: The question was the top.

RAJAGOPALAN: The nudge, I accept. The question is, have I made such a syllabus? No, not yet. This is already in his long comment. There are these two different fields. One is called traditionally “law and economics” [and] is this all-encompassing thing, but it’s split somewhere and actually split within Chicago. What we call “law and economics” within the subfield is really associated with Ronald Coase and his kind of economics where I would actually just call it good institutionally based economics. There’s a certain law or property rights or institutional infrastructure, and then you see what equilibrium plays out in the economy.

That’s a little bit different from this other tradition in law and economics, which is called economic analysis of law, which is what he was alluding to, which is more associated with Richard Posner, who’s also a Chicago law and economics scholar, where we’re talking about the particular rule and how it came about and how it emerged, and also, therefore, the consequences coming out of that rule. I worked a little bit in both, more in the economic analysis of law area, but yes, there’s a lot of work to be done. Homework accepted, Karthik.

FLOER: Yes, thanks for that. I’m curious, and this may not fit, but is there something you could put on The 1991 Project that would relate to this?

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, why not? Yes, I would definitely think on this and make it a twofer, because we have done economic analysis kind of stuff. We’ve done work on competition and antitrust and labor law. I don’t even think of it as a separate thing. I’m trained in that tradition, so anything I do is just touched by it automatically without me intending to do so. Yes, sure, why not? That’ll be fun.

FLOER: Another thing for you to do next year. 

RAJAGOPALAN: Honestly, in all fairness, I’m not the only one who does The 1991 Project. There’s a very nice team of researchers. I shall be handing out diktats and assignments to our awesome team and hopefully, they’ll do their work.

FLOER: Yes, definitely.

RAJAGOPALAN: Which is amazing.

“Home” when living in many cultures 

FLOER: All right. Nasreen Munni Kabir, she wants to know, what does home mean to you now that you’re living between two cultures?

RAJAGOPALAN: I love Nasreen Munni Kabir. I want to say, another person I feel like I’ve been reading her forever and ever and ever. I think about you, Nasreen, more often than you realize. She also does subtitling for a lot of the movies. I’ll be watching a movie, and the subtitle will be particularly good, and I’ll immediately open Wikipedia or IMDB and check who did the subtitling, and invariably it’s her. I think of you very often, Nasreen, and you know how many movies I watch every week.

What is home to me now living between two cultures? I’ve lived in lots of places. I’ve moved around a lot. I like to keep it really simple. Home is where my husband and my dogs are. Before I was married to him, home was where my laptop was so that I could Skype my family. We didn’t have Zoom and WhatsApp and stuff in those days, so I could Skype or just chat with my family. It’s just very simple. If you add my music and books and kitchen to it, that’s it. I never have to leave that space, that is home. I can live there forever. 

How do I live between two cultures? Ah, it’s a good question. You know me well. I’m not very sentimental. I’m not the pining sort. I like to be where I am at the point I am there. I’m not someone who’s constantly pining for this other place I used to live in and enjoy. Everything I really cared about, I just brought it with me. If there’s a certain kind of Indian art, I will have it. If it’s Indian movies, I will find a way to watch it. If it’s in all the cooking or the food I grew up with, and I enjoy it, if I really love it, and I cared enough, I just learned how to make it.

I have organized my life such as things I really enjoyed or loved or made me feel like it’s home in India, I have replicated in my home in Falls Church, and other things that I didn’t pine for so much I just left behind. I’d like to think that’s how I did it. I live in more than two cultures. I think I live in lots of cultures. Yes, I live in what used to be the Ethiopian neighborhood in Falls Church.

FLOER: Oh, really? I didn’t know that.

RAJAGOPALAN: We have the best Ethiopian food. I have at least six amazing Ethiopian restaurants within a seven-, eight-minute drive. I feel like I live in more than two cultures, but that’s how I’ve done it.

FLOER: It’s very easy to bring things that either are from a different culture or just things that you enjoy to yourself than ever before.

RAJAGOPALAN: Than ever before. Exactly. The music, the movies, all of it. Netflix has made it a lot easier. Earlier, there used to be these fake or pirated DVDs they would sell at the Indian or the Pakistani store that you had to find to watch the latest Hindi film. Now, these things play in movie theaters in the US. That’s really how I’ve done it. You’re absolutely right. It’s easier to find stuff than ever before.

FLOER: Yes. You still go to India quite frequently.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, I do go to India quite frequently and I love YouTube. Big shout-out to YouTube, which has all the awesome stuff. I find the most obscure, and Nasreen will appreciate this, there will be this obscure song I suddenly think of from a 1950s Indian movie. Obscure, no one knows it. I’ll put [it] in, and as one would expect, it’s on YouTube, it has at least 6,000 views and 400 comments. I found this niche community of other dorks who care about that minute thing that I care about. Same for recipes. YouTube is awesome to learn new recipes. Big, big shout-out to YouTube.

FLOER: You can get rid of all of the backstory to how they came about this recipe that you see on all the websites.

RAJAGOPALAN: Exactly. I think there’s something very nice about watching people cook and seeing the techniques they use and how they chop something. Then I see the gadgets they use. I found some good lemon zesters and knives just looking at YouTube videos. I’m like, “That looks pretty good. I should have that in my kitchen.” YouTube is how I live simultaneously in two cultures or more cultures.

Next up for The 1991 Project

FLOER: Yes. Doug Irwin, he’s our last one, but he has two questions.

RAJAGOPALAN: I love Doug Irwin. He was the hundredth episode. Big shout-out to Doug.

FLOER: Yes, shout-out to him. All right. What is in store for The 1991 Project in 2025? 

RAJAGOPALAN: Ah, Doug, you will be very happy to hear this because you are writing some awesome papers on India’s liberalization. We are hopefully going to put out all the oral histories early next year. The reason we haven’t put them out already is we’re waiting on one person to give us dates to record. This is N. K. Singh and the only reason we’re waiting for him, I’m not shaming him, it’s just he has been so productive and so busy even in his retirement. He was the finance commission chair before Arvind Panagariya. He was one of the liaisons for the G20 when India was the head of the G20 last year. He’s crazy busy, amazing person, amazing scholar, but we’ve just been waiting to record with him. The Stanford methodology we follow doesn’t let us put all the episodes out until we cover the first set of reformers, basically.

FLOER: Sure, that makes sense.

RAJAGOPALAN: That’s a big thing I’m looking forward to. We’ve been cleaning them up and producing them. Dallas, you’ve been helping. Thank you so much for that.

FLOER: Yes, you’re welcome.

RAJAGOPALAN: The second thing, as I mentioned, I think we just need to now start thinking about reforms at the state level. I’m really hoping that our tiny team, but also all the people who contribute to the project, all the writers who write for it, all the think tanks that we work with in India, I really want to nudge and push and get things done at the state level and at least start having—Doug, you would appreciate this—something like Montek’s M Doc, but for all the different states because they will have different development challenges. That would be a very cool thing to do next year. That’s what I’m hoping for. Once we release the oral histories, you can write the next paper based on them.

Personal goals for 2025

FLOER: Last question from Doug and the last one in this episode, and I think it’s a good one to end on, is, does Shruti have any personal goals for 2025?

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, I have lots of personal goals. Usually, I just change the year because I haven’t accomplished them. The big one next year is I want to finish the book and have it released. 

I want to spend more time with elephants. That’s oddly specific.

FLOER: Tell us more. 

RAJAGOPALAN: I’m going to be in Kochi soon. Next year I’m hoping to go to Africa. There are a couple of elephant orphanages I support near the places I’m hoping to visit. I want to go hang out with elephants.

FLOER: Oh, that sounds nice.

RAJAGOPALAN: My favorite animals. Actually, I just want to hang out with more animals.

FLOER: I think that’s a very good goal. 

RAJAGOPALAN: Elephants would be a good start, but any animals other than reptiles. I’m a little squeamish about reptiles. Most animals I’m just happy to hang out with. That’s something I want to do. Hopefully, I get the book done, which will be the big thing off my back, and all the usual personal goals, lose 10 pounds, which is my goal every year. Eat better, live better, exercise more, all the usual stuff.

FLOER: That’s a lifestyle.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. I’ve still not mastered it.

FLOER: I know. Neither have I. 

RAJAGOPALAN: Hence, they’re still on my personal goal list. I guess I’ll pick spending time with animals and finishing my book. What are your personal goals for next year?

FLOER: Besides the lifestyle stuff of trying to stay healthy and exercising and being active and all that stuff, probably just spending more time with friends and family. I try to prioritize that every year, just because I think we let life get in the way. Then it’s four years later, and you haven’t seen them. I would say managing stress is a big one. I like your goal of spending more time with animals. I love animals as well.

RAJAGOPALAN: Exactly. We have that in common.

FLOER: Yes. I don’t know what I would do necessarily. My husband and I went to Hawaii earlier this year, and their zoo is so thriving as far as all the animals there were just happy. You could see it. I want to be around that. Things where I can see in their face, even if it’s a person and not an animal. Just being around people who are smart and productive and happy and they want good things to happen for you. That sort of thing.

RAJAGOPALAN: This is going to sound really weird and uber specific. You know I’m a weird person. I am obsessed with Jonathan, the turtle. I think he’s this giant turtle who’s 190 years old.

FLOER: Oh, I think I know what you’re talking about.

RAJAGOPALAN: He’s all over social media. Hi, Jonathan, if you’re listening.

FLOER: He definitely is.

RAJAGOPALAN: I recently found out that he is in the middle of nowhere, Saint Helena, which is this British overseas territory. It’s a dot in the middle of the Atlantic. I think that is Jonathan’s secret to his long life because no one is bothering him because he lives in the middle of nowhere. He looks adorable. He’s been around for 190 years.

FLOER: I know.

RAJAGOPALAN: He overlapped with Strauss and Liszt.

FLOER: He’s seen some stuff.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. Or seen nothing because he’s trapped on this tiny island. I think he was hatched in Seychelles, I want to say. Another place in the middle of nowhere, except that’s the other side of Africa and this is the west of Africa. 

I think the easiest way to get to this island is by flying from South Africa, which is already, I think, 20 hours away from where I’m sitting. I don’t even know how one would go about getting to Saint Helena, but one of the things I really want to do is make friends with Jonathan. 

I follow lots of crazy creatures on Instagram. The easiest way to get me to part with my money is have an Instagram page for whatever animal we’re trying to save. Elephant orphanages are my favorite. Now I’m obsessed with Jonathan and other dogs and other such animals. I will hook you up.

FLOER: Please do. I would say, I have to check out Jonathan.

RAJAGOPALAN: Jonathan is adorable.

FLOER: Yes. Another one that’s popular is Fiona the hippo in Cincinnati.

RAJAGOPALAN: Oh, yes, I know Fiona the hippo. What is the other one? Moo Deng, who’s the latest.

FLOER: Oh, Moo Deng.

RAJAGOPALAN: Latest sensation. Internet sensation.

FLOER: Adorable.

RAJAGOPALAN: Where is Moo Deng?

FLOER: Good question.

RAJAGOPALAN: Physically located?

FLOER: Let’s look it up. Where is Moo Deng? Thailand.

RAJAGOPALAN: Thailand? Okay, I got to go to Thailand. I want to go to Kenya where there’s this place called the Sheldrick Trust. For $50 you can sponsor one of their orphaned elephants or giraffes or something. Easiest way to get me to part with my money. 

We’re going to Kochi for Emergent Ventures and there is an elephant training center and orphanage about a couple of hours from there. I’ve been there before. I’d love to go again if I can squeeze in the time. That’s the kind of stuff I want to do. That sounds weird hanging with elephants, but…

FLOER: I’m with you.

RAJAGOPALAN: Maybe that’s a good note to end your episode on. Before I do that, first up, Dallas, thank you for everything.

FLOER: Of course.

Thanks and Good Wishes

RAJAGOPALAN: For the listeners, I’ve said this every year, Dallas is the single most organized person I know. I think I can say with a fair amount of confidence, the most organized person in this building.

FLOER: Thank you.

RAJAGOPALAN: I’m pretty sure. Huge shout-out to you because you make this entire crazy machinery work, and we have other people working on the podcast. We have Sam Alburger who is our sound engineer and one of the producers. We have Jeff Holmes, another producer and our creative director and mentor of sorts who manages all the podcasts that we produce in Mercatus. We have Houston Beckworth. He’s Houston or Houston like New Yorker say?

FLOER: Houston.

RAJAGOPALAN: Excellent. Houston.

FLOER: We have a big Texas contingent on this podcast. 

RAJAGOPALAN: Exactly. We have Houston Beckworth, who’s done some editing. Mary Horan, Jenny Kronovet, Beata Nas, who typically do the copy editing of the transcript depending on which week who’s working on the transcript. We have Shreyas Narla and Kadambari Shah and Ankita Dinkar who are also part of The 1991 Project. Sometimes they will chip in with working on the transcript or helping us book a guest or something like that. We have Jen Whistler, who’s on our marketing team. Again, maybe you and Jen have to fight it out for the most organized person.

FLOER: Jen can take it.

RAJAGOPALAN: I think I’m betting on you.

FLOER: No, Jen is also very, very organized.

RAJAGOPALAN: She’s amazing. Jen runs all the newsletters and marketing and things like that. She’s the reason you’ve heard of the podcast or that it reaches you or you can share it with your friends and things like that. Thanks to all of you. You guys make this super easy. I just read this off, show up, record, and disappear. Everything else is done by all of you, so thanks a lot.

FLOER: No, thanks, Shruti. Everything that you do for the podcast doesn’t go unnoticed either. Without you, we wouldn’t have a show.

RAJAGOPALAN: This show. You would have a show, but maybe not this show.

FLOER: This show. Thanks, Shruti. I appreciate it.

RAJAGOPALAN: Awesome. Thank you. Happy New Year, and we will see you next year.

FLOER: See you in 2025.