Why Canada should join the EU Macleans Magazine, July 30, 2025
Excerpt: Canada has always been good at compromise. Geographically, politically, economically, we live in the hyphen between other people’s empires. But compromise is not the same as strategy. If the world is sorting itself into continental, commercial and geopolitical blocs, we need to stop pretending we either float between them or rise above them.Research Practice Partnerships (RPPs), SciFi Financing Impact Podcast hosted by Olga Almquist, June, 2023
How do you know you are making a positive impact? ESMT Open Lecture, November, 2023
Can we Make Globalization more Sustainable?, Convoco! Podcast hosted by Dr. Corinne Flick, May, 2023
At a Loss with Biodiversity Loss? Feb. 6, 2023, 3 Quarks Daily.
Excerpt: Declines in biodiversity pose an existential threat to life on earth. We rely on biodiversity for our food, air, water, medicine, and almost everything else that we need to sustain humanity. Yet most people don’t even know what biodiversity means, let alone what to do about it.Inequality, Justice, and Economics, Aug. 22, 2022, 3 Quarks Daily. 25-min video version from the Convoco Forum, 2022.
Excerpt: In the last two decades the topic of inequality has entered the public discourse across a broad spectrum of issues, with an urgency that is astonishing...Surprisingly, economists are not front and centre of this discussion...[because] today’s empirical economists don’t talk about justice. Why [not]?When Autonomy Helps Team Performance — and When It Doesn’t (with Viktoria Boss, Linus Dahlander, Christoph Ihl), December 1, 2022, Harvard Business Review.
Excerpt: From GitHub to Google, companies are increasingly adopting policies that allow teams substantial autonomy over both who they work with and what they work on. This can help employees to feel greater levels of ownership over their work, thus boosting creativity and innovation — but recent research suggests it’s easy to take autonomy too far. In a new study, the authors found that teams which were allowed to choose both the composition of their groups and the ideas they worked on actually performed substantially worse than those who were only allowed to choose either teammates or ideas (but not both). Based on this surprising finding, the authors argue that the question managers should ask themselves is not whether they should give teams autonomy, but what kind of autonomy they should give them. Instead of becoming obsessed with autonomy above all else, the authors suggest that managers should take a more nuanced approach and think critically about which areas will benefit from autonomy — and which will not.Midday meals in India improve children’s learning outcomes, Sep. 27, 2022, VoxDev
Excerpt: [P]rimary school-aged children’s learning outcomes increase, albeit at a decreasing rate, with exposure to midday meals...a child who has been exposed to midday meals throughout primary school has reading test scores that are 18% (0.17 standard deviations) higher and math test scores that are 9% (0.09 standard deviations) higher than those of a child with less than one year of exposure. This is important in view of the negligible learning effects of school feeding programmes documented in the literature to date. In particular, the extant literature has—without exception—examined programme effects after at most two years of exposure. Our results suggest that students may need prolonged exposure to reap substantive learning benefits from the programme.Market Power, Jan. 10, 2022, 3 Quarks Daily.
Excerpt: [I]f my support for minimum wages rested on my commitment to social justice, the prospect of this policy instrument causing a dramatic increase in unemployment would give me pause...The good news is that a large body of economic research from rich countries indicates that, for the most part, unemployment hasn’t increased dramatically with the introduction of higher minimum wages.Prime Minister Modi--What Gives? May 31, 2021, 3 Quarks Daily.
Excerpt: I know someone...who is a Modi supporter. Personally, I have great affection for him. Politically, we are now like oil and water... In order to understand why people like him continue to support Modi—even now, as India is ravaged by the pandemic—I did something that I hadn’t done before. I asked him, and I listened without arguing.Canada should be a leader in global vaccination and here is how to do that (with Peter Burns) May 10, 2021, Toronto Star.
Excerpt: How has Canada responded to India’s crisis? It has banned travel from India and offered $10 million in aid to its 1.4 billion people: equivalent to placing a dime on the doorstep and shutting the door. Needless to say, the door is not actually shut. The dominant variant in India is already present and spreading in Canada.So, you "Stand by #FarmerProtests", April 5, 2021, 3 Quarks Daily.
Excerpt: Protesters worry that this leaves them vulnerable to powerful business interests. Like the Gauls in Asterix & Obelix, left at the mercy of the Roman empire, except…that smell wafting from the cauldron? It isn’t the druid’s magic potion that gives Gaulish warriors superhuman strength. It’s dal makhani. Delicious, but unlikely to level the playing field.The Economic and the Social: Anatomy of a Contract Change in India (with Debraj Ray), July 26, 2017, VoxDev
Excerpt: In a variety of interactions, the economic and the social rub shoulders, often in uneasy co-existence...‘Extrinsic incentives’ linking performance to money may crowd out ‘intrinsic incentives’ to exert effort. Is the same true of paid employees in organisations governed by the profit motive?Razon Burn, March 4, 2024, 3 Quarks Daily
Excerpt: I wish somebody had told us about epistemological razors. Because they may have given us pause, if only fleetingly, on our countless descents down the rabbit hole.When Time Stands Still, January 8, 2024, 3 Quarks Daily
Excerpt: We stumbled through our teenage years in unlaced high tops and heavy, too-long, too-baggy jeans. Like hip hop stars in the nineties, except that it was the eighties and no one is ever contemporaneously ahead of their time.Looking backward, Moving Forward, July 24, 2023, 3 Quarks Daily
Excerpt: What bothered me was the patronizing otherness with which she described Rwandans. Patronizing because they were so sweet and spoke such good French. Otherness because the implication seemed to be that only “these people” are capable of this level of barbarism.Raji Cells, October 17, 2022, 3 Quarks Daily, Audio version
Excerpt: The first haematopoietic, or blood-derived, human cell line was named for a Nigerian boy who died of Burkitt’s Lymphoma in 1963. His name was Raji.Rite of Passage, May 2, 2022, 3 Quarks Daily.
Excerpt: Embarking on a road trip destined for a deserted strip of land on India’s southern coastline had never been on our radar. Neither had we imagined making such a trip in order to consecrate our mother’s ashes to the sea.Canadian Club, March 7, 2022, 3 Quarks Daily.
Excerpt: I arrived in this city that seemed engineered for inclusion, fully expecting to be embraced into its fold. Turns out, just because society is mixed doesn’t mean it wants to mix with you.The Death of Waggy, July 26, 2021, 3 Quarks Daily.
Excerpt: That year, we had a house guest. Anand bhaia was a Bengali-Fijian priest and, it being December, our parents adopted his Christmas traditions with gusto. We were unenthusiastic, but our parents insisted on our active participation. "Atithi Devo Bhava,” our mother explained. A guest is God. The irony of this Hindu foundation for her embrace of Christianity was not lost on her but, blinded by indignation, we mistook her generosity for hypocrisy.Plumbing the Depths, December 14, 2020, 3 Quarks Daily, Audio version
Excerpt: During the puja, our heads remained bowed. It was a pose that our parents mistook for devotion but was in fact calculated to avoid having the occasional jets of urine, emanating from the bats housed in the pitch-black rafters overhead, from landing on our faces.The Many Identities of Kamala Harris, August 24, 2020, 3 Quarks Daily.
Excerpt: Kamala Harris resembles nothing so much as a Hindu God whose multiple heads are being revealed one-by-one in some kind of elaborate magic trick. I’m totally fine with this, and I suspect most other Indians are too.Cultural Aphasia, July 27, 2020, 3 Quarks Daily, Audio version
Excerpt: Over the last few decades, numerous Indian states and cities in the field have been re-christened, mostly because the British romped around the planet mispronouncing names and then spelling them accordingly. I’ve spent a long time trying to decide whether their misspellings are a mark of a. carelessness, b. arrogance, or c. disrespect. My best guess is d. all of the above.Nudity, June 29, 2020, 3 Quarks Daily, Audio version
Excerpt: Tourists visit Germany for four main reasons...The fourth is naked people.Manu's Men, November 13, 2023, 3 Quarks Daily
Excerpt: At the end of the day, [mothers-in-law] too are women. So my question is: Where do they get their power over daughters-in-law from? And why is said power so monstrously exercised?Minding the Gender Wage Gap, September 20, 2021, 3 Quarks Daily
Excerpt: [E]qual pay for equal work is very important, and it’s a battle worth fighting. But it’s not going to win the war because, very often, the premise of that statement is flawed. Work is not equal to begin with.Girls and Math (with Peter Burns), February 8, 2021, 3 Quarks Daily
Excerpt: Girls don’t start school hating math or doing worse at it than boys. Then, somewhere in elementary school, this changes for many girls and in some (though not all) countries, a gender gap in math performance appears....[Then] kids hit high school where they get to choose their subjects, and the great divergence is set in motion. Girls disproportionately opt out of math-intensive subjects. From there, there’s really no turning back. Girls tend to study subjects, and graduate with degrees in fields, that have lower math requirements. In the U.S., women receive only about a quarter of bachelor’s degrees in physics, engineering and computer science; the pattern persists in graduate school. That there are tragically few women in these professions, is a logical consequence.Systemic Racism -- Vicious Circles (with Larry Blume), November 16, 2020, 3 Quarks Daily
Excerpt: The blunt reality is that vicious circles are pervasive, pernicious, and hard to break out of. The adaptive capacity of individuals in such systems to adjust to their circumstances, be they good or bad, makes system outcomes resilient to change. If indeed “The moment has come for our nation to deal with systemic racism”, the Biden-Harris administration will have to address this kind of systemic racism with social policies that work at large enough scale to be truly disruptive.Racial Disparity & Racial Bias, October 19, 2020, 3 Quarks Daily
Excerpt: Evidence that racial disparities can be attributed to statistical discrimination gives me no joy. But it does give me a modicum of hope that something can be done to reduce disparities.