Thread by @svembu

1/ There is this technocratic idea that Economics is a scientific discipline like Physics. Not true.

Subject to the "conservation law" that the world cannot consume what it has not produced yet, economic relationships arise from our personal, social, cultural and moral choices.

2/ A productive community can express a moral preference for an egalitarian ethos.

At Zoho, we express a moral preference for all of us having the same food and setting for everyone i.e, no special executive dining rooms.

No economic law dictates a "correct" course here.

3/ As I once joked, I made a choice to invest in designing an LTE modem vs buying a private jet! Again no economic law can dictate this choice.

Yet, these choices greatly influence economic outcomes and the overall well being of a community.

4/ Political economy - and economics is explicitly political outside of the "conservation law", which sets a mathematical boundary - is about how a company or community makes these choices of where to commit resources. LTE modem or private jet? Bullet trains or rural broadband?

5/ I respect politicians more than economists for this reason: politicians grapple with the political economy choices, however (very!) imperfectly, while economists pretend to give objective answers from their mathematical models. Most of those models are garbage in, garbage out.

6/ India's curse is that among Asian nations, India has had the most economists advising us. East Asian nations like Japan or Taiwan or South Korea have historically produced few economists. I see a direct connection between their prosperity and their producing few economists!

7/ We must get rid of the technocratic obsession with credentialed economists and go by experience and observation on the ground. We must always keep the political economy of choices in mind, governed by our cultural and social ethos.

Good politics is good economics.