Vedant

Interested in the art of negotiation, poetry, trivia, analytical philosophy, solo travelling & playing the harmonica. Fascinated by culture & markets.

[Vedant @ved_ant_m]

Glad to have done this talk at XKDR Forum this August on all the things about the Indian Parliament that have fascinated me. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did delivering it. An ode to new beginnings!

#NewParliamentBuilding #Parliament

[XKDR Forum @XkdrF]

Last month as part of XKDR Forum talks, @ved_ant_m gave us a presentation on the Indian Parliament and how it works . The video is available now at https://t.co/nTBGJ6vqx6
Watch the video to get a snapshot of the inner workings of the Indian Parliament.
#IndianParliament

[Vedant @ved_ant_m]

@pranaykotas @justicepolity A partial answer: https://t.co/dcIERaLF0m

[Anup Malani @anup_malani]

Imagine tailoring trousers using the average leg length across all men. No measurement error. Perfect data. But your trousers fit almost no one. @LantPritchett (2024) shows that's exactly what "evidence-based" development policy does.

[Vedant @ved_ant_m]

@captgouda24 But unlike the NPT guys, governments are not benevolent dictators -- they are indeed like Stigler's regulators who are subject to political favoritism responsive to influence. Based on the pressure effectiveness, you get different outcomes in different industries.

[Vedant @ved_ant_m]

@captgouda24 Every side of a regulation has a loser and a winner. But (unlike Stigler) too much regulation increases deadweight costs which then induces pressure from the other group. Governments then choose regulation to stave off deadweight losses precisely what the NPT guys say they do.

[Vedant @ved_ant_m]

My only question is: what is an alternative world where gig workers are better off?

Do their counterfactual worlds look better than this one? No.

Is someone creating the utopia world? Not yet!

Majboori is when you believe the worker has no agency (not choice)!

[शिक्���ित बेरोज़गार @kaul_vivek]

When privilege pretends to be economics: Why Deepinder Goyal gets it royally wrong

On January 1, Deepinder Goyal decided to welcome 2026 by going all guns blazing on X.

Over 4.5 lakh delivery partners, he said, delivered more than 75 lakh orders on December 31 – unaffected by strike calls. Proof, according to him, that the gig economy is working just fine. And if you think otherwise, well, you've probably been misled by "vested interests".

If I were writing this as a glowing investor note or a LinkedIn post about India's unstoppable startup story, I could have stopped right there. Maybe added a chart or two. Maybe thrown in the word 'disruption' somewhere. And then moved on.

But alas, that's not how realty works.

Because once you slow down and actually read what Goyal is saying, a very different picture emerges – one where desperation is dressed up as choice, a very high attrition rate is sold as flexibility, and structural problems are reframed as moral guilt felt by the consumers.

In my analysis, I do something very unfashionable: I take Goyal at his word – and then deconstruct it, point by point.

Why "people keep showing up, so the system must be fair" is a deeply flawed argument.

How high attrition is being repackaged as evidence that gig work is a matter of choice – proof that it is merely a “gig” and not meant to be anyone’s long-term job – rather than being acknowledged for what it really is: economically unsustainable.

Why blaming "society" for traffic violations conveniently lets platforms off the hook.

How averages on earnings hide the real costs riders bear – EMIs, depreciation of vehicles and smartphones, risk.

Why comparing delivery partners to IT freshers is a false equivalence.

From Industrial England to Silicon Valley to Gurugram, markets rarely correct power imbalances on their own. They need scrutiny, regulation, and pressure from outside.

India’s gig economy undoubtedly delivers speed and convenience. What is also delivers – quietly, efficiently – is insecurity. Safety risks. Capital costs borne by workers.

And a language carefully designed to make all of this sound normal.

The real question is not whether the gig economy creates work, but whether it creates work that is economically viable once risk, costs, and churn, are honestly accounted for.

https://t.co/qp7c9poEHo

My essay @newslaundry @MnshaP

[Deepinder Goyal @deepigoyal]

One more thing. Our 10 minute delivery promise is enabled by the density of stores around your homes. It’s not enabled by asking delivery partners to drive fast. Delivery partners don’t even have a timer on their app to indicate what was the original time promised to the customer.

After you place your order on Blinkit, it is picked and packed within 2.5 minutes. And then the rider drives an average of under 2kms in about 8 minutes. That's an average of 15kmph.

I understand why everybody thinks why 10 minutes must be risking lives, because it is indeed hard to imagine the sheer complexity of the system design which enables quick deliveries.

Also, if you've ever wanted to know why millions of Indians voluntarily take up platform work and sometimes even prefer it to regular jobs, JUST ASK any rider partner when you get your next food or grocery order.

You will be humbled by how rational and honest they will be with you.

Having said that, no system is perfect, and we are all for making it better than today. However, it is far from what it is being portrayed on social media by people who don't understand how our system works and why.

If I were outside the system, I would also believe that gig workers are being exploited, but that's not true.

[Vedant @ved_ant_m]

Competition Economics 101: Concentration is a biased predictor of market power. https://t.co/TVXmpVXRzC

This fiasco doesn't need competition law to solve the issue.

Sure, entry conditions can always improve but @IndiGo6E won the game fair and square by lowering prices!

[Milan Vaishnav @MilanV]

Why does India "have only four functional domestic airlines, of which two have over 90 per cent market share? For an already large and still underserved market, why such market concentration?" https://t.co/d9ztP51ZEy

[Vedant @ved_ant_m]

Bottomline: don't punish the efficient guys -- they won fair and square! Ease the conditions for entry.

[Vedant @ved_ant_m]

A thread on why competition (specifically, market power) does not causally arise from concentration (aka market shares). And why the cases against Jio and Indigo are grossly misjudged. BIG IS NOT ALWAYS BAD!!!

The economics are more complicated. 1/n

@sardesairajdeep

[Ramanuj Mukherjee @law_ninja]

Dangerous duopolies in India:

1. Indigo + Air India
2. Jio + Airtel
3. Uber + Ola + (Rapido as fig leaf?)
4. Amazon + Flipkart
5. Zomato + Swiggy
6. JioFiber + Airtel Xstream
7. Blinkit + Zepto (+ Swiggy Instamart)
8. Naukri + LinkedIn (job posting)
9. Google Ads + Meta Ads

Did I miss something?

[Vedant @ved_ant_m]

The second ingredient is the existence of swift bankruptcy: the pre-requisite for free entry is free exit. If my assets are going to remain sunk and I cannot recover much from a dignified exit, I will not invest in the first place.

[Rohit Shinde @rohitshinde121]

I disagree almost entirely here. Here's why:
1. The biggest fallacy here is that bad labor laws themselves distort firm size. So wage bill will of course be low. Growing beyond a point is hazardous. If firms fear that they cannot restructure later, they will also have low investment in tech, and wouldn't invest in multi-year expansions.

2. Wage share doesn't matter. Adjustment costs matter. The option value of flexibility is what makes businesses decide to increase their labor force. Rigid labor laws don't affect the cost of labor, they affect the cost of adjusting employment.

3. India's labor laws increased firing costs, hiring costs, regulatory costs, penalties, inspection harassments, etc. So even if wage share is low, these adjustment costs can easily be 10x of wages. With the new laws, instead of paying adjustment costs, companies can hire more workers instead to produce more output.

4. No company optimizes for wages. In fact, fast growing companies often care more about top line growth than bottom line costs. Which is why people prefer higher wage costs rather than regulatory frictions.

5. Contract workers DO NOT prove that laws were already lenient. In fact, the causality is the other way around. Contracting proves how rigid the laws were.

6. And finally a good analogy for this argument is: "The steering wheel is only 0.001% of a car’s weight, so it cannot matter for driving." Small things have first-order consequences.

[Vincent Geloso @VincentGeloso]

As Lant Pritchett often points out, GDP per capita is more than sufficient to capture overall progress. Measures such as “Basic Needs” or the “Social Progress Index” — inspired by the Stiglitz Commission’s work — add little of substantive value.

First, I’m always surprised that critics of GDP believe they have made a novel discovery. It’s as if they think no one before them has considered or studied GDP’s limitations. In reality, Lant has spent years demonstrating that these “extra” indicators, while occasionally interesting, rarely add insights that GDP doesn’t already convey.

Second, the ideological tilt of GDP’s critics is highly predictable. They tend to lean left relative to the average economist (though there are a few right-leaning exceptions). What’s amusing is that their “limitations” of GDP always point in the same direction — you can almost predict the nature of the supposed bias before hearing it. I’ve written several papers myself on GDP’s limitations, but my findings tend to show things these critics would dislike — for instance, that government output contributes less to measured welfare than is typically assumed because of accounting conventions (see image 3). Moreover, other research suggests that GDP understates progress by a wide margin; a classic example is William Nordhaus’s paper on the price of light (see image 4).

The reality is that I would hazard that 80% of criticisms of GDP are actually just wishful thinking masquerading as criticism. The other 20% is worth engaging with.