Political economists

When some of India’s top economists gathered at a book launch in Delhi recently, they made the most of the opportunity to take a dig at politicians. Bimal Jalan sparked the debate by saying there is an incentive to join politics and no one would like to be a politician if that incentive were reversed. Nitin Desai said the finance ministry should call its economists political scientists because they are always busy writing papers on how to achieve good policies with bad politics, and Deepak Nayyar added that behind every successful politician there are the ideas of some defunct economists.