“Quando uma mulher é levada a se preocupar o tempo todo com sua aparência, ela tem menos tempo para questionar a ausência de suas liberdades.”
Marjane Satrapi
(1969-2026)
I find it odd when people turn businessmen into role models, and this seems to have become more common in the last 5-odd years. It's the same with idolising movie stars and sports stars. None of it should happen, really. 😀
When people come to me for advice, my first reaction is: What makes you think I'm qualified?
Just because I've gotten lucky in business, does that make me qualified to advise you on your career, your life choices, or anything apart from how to get lucky? 😀
There are startup founders, especially people working in the social sector, whom I meet through @RainmatterOrg, and I think they are far smarter and more capable of giving advice than I am.
If you still pick a role model, pick someone for a trait worth admiring in real life, not because of what they project to the outside world.
Economics has never been, and never will be, a value-free science.
At its core, economics is shaped by ideologies, value judgements, competing interests, social norms, and political priorities.
Adam Smith and Karl Marx — two of the most important figures in the history of economics — both treated it as an inherently political subject. They didn't even call it "economics." They called it political economy.
For Smith, the study of wealth creation was inseparable from questions about the state, social class, and moral philosophy. For Marx, the economy was a system of power relations.
Yet most introductory economics textbooks relegate politics, power, and history to footnotes. Technical models fill the space instead, abstractions that describe an imaginary economy more than the real one.
My newsletter's most popular piece is on how economics became a discipline detached from politics — despite the fact that it is intrinsically and unavoidably political.
Link to the full piece in the comments.
The chaos unleashed by haphazard digitisation without pilots, training or feedback. The rural poor have faced this. Now it's just broken class barriers. Lovely explainer @samzsays
PSA to libertarian-leaning friends: if you're trying to extol the virtues of the unregulated market, avoid talking about the healthcare sector.
It's not gonna work out well for your argument. It just won't.
On Indian poverty reduction:
New paper from Pete Lanjouw & coauthors, who pioneered methods for linking poverty measures across messy data series:
"All estimates indicate a significant slowing of poverty decline between 2011/12 and 2022/23 compared to the preceding decade"
🎧 Anemia (commonly caused by iron deficiency) affects ~2 billion people. But understanding how much iron programs improve lives is surprisingly hard.
CEO Elie Hassenfeld + Researcher Andrew Martin discuss our work on iron + our grants to @FortifyHealth: https://t.co/KRMKTYoO6H
"I am a refugee in my own land. My grandfather and my ancestors were forced to leave their village, their city, and move far away. That is why, from day one here, I felt the pain of the East Bengal fans. They made me realize there is no difference between us.