Catastrophic health shocks do enormous damage to families both economically and otherwise, and are easy to insure, because nobody gets them on purpose. On the other hand, insurance policies that only treat certain catastrophic illnesses are hard to comprehend, especially of you are illiterate and unused to the legalistic nature of exclusions etc.
I am not partisan in my economic thinking. We work with any number of state governments, many of which are BJP governments.
If democracy as we know it has to survive the elites have to regain their credibility. And they have to start by admitting that their economic model is broken.
When I was a graduate student, I actually took a course in development economics and I thought it was the most boring thing in the world.
I was trained as an economic theorist; my job at MIT was as an economic theorist. At some level that's still part of my identity.
Partly, identity politics is a result of economic failure.
Classic economic theory, based as it is on an inadequate theory of human motivation, could be revolutionized by accepting the reality of higher human needs, including the impulse to self actualization and the love for the highest values.
Global poverty is a complex web of interlinked problems. There is no one 'silver bullet' that will solve global inequality. Multiple contributing factors must be tackled in parallel. Yes, education alone is unlikely to lead to employment without economic reform to address the demand side in much of the developing world.
The anti-New Deal line is wrong as a matter of economics. F.D.R.'s spending programs did help the economy and created millions of new jobs.
We live in a time when all elites, whether on the left or the right, believe in rigid rules that say there is no alternative to the present political and economic system.
