2025 in Review

DALLAS FLOER: Hey everyone, this is Dallas Floer, I’m one of the producers of Ideas of India. Today I’ll be interviewing Shruti for our end-of-year episode. We’ll look back at key themes and top episodes from the past year, address your listener questions, and look forward to what’s in store for Shruti and the show in 2026.

On behalf of Shruti, myself, and the entire Ideas of India team, thank you for listening to the podcast this year, and we’re very excited to bring you more episodes in the new year. 

Hey everyone, this is Dallas Floer, I’m one of the producers of Ideas of India. Today I’ll be interviewing Shruti for our end-of-year episode. We’ll look back at key themes and top episodes from the past year, address your listener questions, and look forward to what’s in store for Shruti and the show in 2026.

On behalf of Shruti, myself, and the entire Ideas of India team, thank you for listening to the podcast this year , and we’re very excited to bring you more episodes in the new year. 

Hello, everyone. This is Dallas. I’m one of the producers of Ideas of India. Today, I’ll be interviewing Shruti for our end-of-year episode. We’ll look back at the big themes and top episodes from 2025, answer your listener questions, and talk a bit about what’s ahead for the show and Shruti in 2026. Shruti, thanks again for doing this.

SHRUTI RAJAGOPALAN: Hi, Dallas. Thank you for having me. This is my favorite episode of Ideas of India because I just show up, and I get to have a conversation with you. And you’re one of my favorite people in Mercatus, so this is awesome.

Listener Questions

FLOER: Awesome. Yes. We’re going to do what we always do, start with listener questions.

RAJAGOPALAN: Oh, yes.

FLOER: We’ve put out a call for questions on X. If you’re not following us or Shruti over there, please do, so you can ask us a question next year. This year, we got some good ones. First, let’s start with Amit Varma, friend of the show. He wants to know, was there ever a moment, during or after a recording, when you felt like, “Wow, this makes it all worth it”?

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. He asked me this question too, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt it during a recording. I’m so focused on what’s going on in the recording. My mind doesn’t daydream. I’m just totally locked into listening. I felt it after. This year, I think it happened during the job market episodes because we’ve been doing the job market series for five years now. This was the sixth cohort of people on the job market and young scholars.

Many of them said that they started listening to the job market series when they started their PhD. They’ve grown up as graduate scholars listening to both the show and also the job market series, and how excited they were to be chosen for it. That felt like a really special moment. I always think that I’m on this wild ride, and I’m going on this crazy journey with all these scholars. The idea that there are other people who feel like they’ve gone on this journey with me, and they’ve also grown, and they’ve also learned so much, it was really cool.

I guess, this year, that was one of the moments when I felt like, wow, this was really worth it, but it happened before we started recording. Because I usually chat with the speaker for a few minutes before we hit record, and that’s when it happened.

FLOER: I think it was Kartik was the first one this year. He, I think, explicitly said that he started listening because he was going to get his PhD. Then he told you that, and you were like, “You’ll be the first one this year.” That’s why he kicked off the series.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. This was Kartik Srivastava. We had two Kartiks this year. I think both of them had been listening to it this entire time, but Kartik Srivastava said it. He was the first person we recorded with. He was the first one we released. It was really nice. Another lovely coincidence with Karthik and also with Asad was they were co-authors on papers with scholars who had been on the job market series last year—

FLOER: Oh, nice.

RAJAGOPALAN: —or the year before that. Again, those sorts of things sometimes just make me feel like, “Wow, we set out to build a community of listeners and scholars, all of us going on this journey together, and I think we’ve accomplished a bit of that.” That was really cool.

FLOER: Totally.Next, a couple of questions from Amol Agrawal. He’s a previous guest on the show. First one is, he wants to know, how does Shruti pick the young PhD scholars to feature on the podcast? He said, the diversity of speakers is stunning and staggering. That leads to the second part of his question, which is, where does Shruti get the time to read so much?

RAJAGOPALAN: Amol is too nice. He is an incredible scholar. He actually has this long-running blog that I’ve been following, I don’t even know for how many years. He’s one to say that I read a lot. He’s the one who’s posting daily. He’s amazing. Hi, Amol. How we pick the job market scholars is quite straightforward. The first few years, we just try to include as many as possible. One year, if six people wrote in, we try to include all six. If one year, if 12 people wrote in, we try to include all 12.

This was basically anyone who had a complete job market paper or dissertation that they sent in that I found comprehensible, because I have to be able to ask the questions. We didn’t set a very high bar. I guess the diversity is explained by the diversity of listeners or people who follow us on Twitter, because we just put a call out. We don’t gatekeep in any way. I guess people think that this is a good place to have a diverse set of ideas. I’m very grateful that they think that.

Over the years, especially last year and this year, we’ve had to do some picking because way more people have sent in their work than we had slots for. We try to do it as fairly as possible. We have a limited window. As soon as everything comes in, we make sure we have their papers and their dissertations. I actually give it all a quick skim before choosing. The main constraint is I should find it interesting and be able to ask questions.

I’m not doing anything more contrived than that. It’s just, “Oh, this is interesting.” This year, I was quite tempted. I was like, “Oh my God, two people on monetary economics. This is so hard. I’ve forgotten all my monetary economics.” As I start reading it all, my memory gets jogged, and it all starts coming back. I’m basically the only constraint. I’m sure we would have an even more diverse set of people if I weren’t the only one doing it.

The second question, how do I read so much? I guess just read every day. We both work with Tyler Cowen. You also produce his show. Tyler always asks the question, “What is the equivalent of musicians doing scales like you do every day in your life?” If you’re a speaker, do you speak every day and you practice? If you’re a writer, do you write every day?” I can’t even remember for how long. I just read every single day. I don’t have a set number of pages or anything because I think now it’s just a habit.

I’ll read anywhere. I will read anything. People don’t know this about me. I also read lots of trashy stuff. I will read all these airport spy thrillers. I read everything, but just reading every day. The second thing is compounds. I think Amol knows this, too. We’re in the business of doing this. The more you read, the more you’re able to make connections. Also, all my incentives are completely anchored to reading. I always feel like I’m not reading enough because we work with Tyler, and he reads as much in a week that I read in a month.

FLOER: He’s on another level.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. I’m always feeling like a slacker, like I’m always behind. He would have read a book and just handed it over to me, saying, “Oh, this is great. You should read it.” Three and a half months later, I’ll get to it. I guess all my incentives are aligned with reading.

FLOER: Yes. To your point, it’s just part of your routine now. You don’t have to think about it really.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, I don’t have to think about it much. I don’t have anything  else. Oh, and I’m ruthless. I give up on books and terrible papers and books very quickly. That’s the other reason I think I end up reading as much as I do, because I’m quite conscious of how much time gets wasted on bad ideas.

FLOER: I think more people should do that, probably. He has another question. There is this food for thought book titled The Idea of India by Sunil Khilnani. He’s mentioning that you’ve been running Ideas of India for a while now. It’s been five years, like you mentioned. How do you see the Idea of India panning out based on so many conversations that you’ve had?

RAJAGOPALAN: One of the reasons we called it Ideas of India as opposed to Sunil Khilnani’s book—and I know Sunil and I’ve read that book, and it was hugely influential, and I think he’s an incredible scholar—somewhere it really bothered me that there might be one idea of India. It’s just not possible. I think also coming from the free market classical liberal tradition, we don’t truly believe that everyone will come toward or converge upon this homogenized idea of anything.

I always knew that there are many ideas, and the goal was to capture as many voices as possible. The one thing I’ve learned doing this for five years is I feel now like it’s a little bit like a jigsaw puzzle. The literature on India, it was a mile wide and an inch deep when I was growing up. Now I feel like there’s so much specialization. Now, if you just pick the state of Bihar or the state of Odisha, there are so many scholars just working on that or in monetary policy. There’s so much deep dive happening.

One thing that I think is useful is there’s a lot more specialization, and second, there’s a lot more regional variation. More and more regions get captured. The third is just different points of view. We look at the same thing from the point of view of politics or culture or economics or history or other things that I’m not capturing. Food. I feel like I’m putting together a jigsaw puzzle in some way, and each additional conversation I have helps me figure out that little piece and put it in the jigsaw puzzle. That’s how I think about it.

FLOER: I think that’s a good description. All right. Pramod Biligiri, they want to know, in your great conversation with Rajmohan Gandhi, he mentioned how M. K. Gandhi wanted to attend and encourage marriages between privileged and oppressed castes. These days, politicians talk about caste a lot, but I’ve never heard them praise such intercaste marriages. He wants to know why is that.

RAJAGOPALAN: Hi, Pramod. Pramod’s a longtime listener and always writes in. I think he’s the one person who’s written every year in the audience questions—

FLOER: I think so, yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: —which is awesome. Pramod, thank you for listening so carefully. You’re wonderful. I disagree with Pramod, actually. For instance, this is not quite as well known, but Yogi Adityanath, who is the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, which is India’s largest state, actually has incentives for intercaste marriages. There are lots of these incentives for the girl child, or when a daughter graduates or when a daughter gets a job, or state support to give incentives that if your daughter finishes college, then there will be a cash transfer that’s given that you can use toward her wedding or something like that.

The amount for intercaste marriage is actually higher in the Uttar Pradesh incentives and subsidies. Now, this doesn’t mean I support it. I’m generally not in favor of state subsidizing weddings and the state actually interfering in the idea of personal contracts like marriages, but I do think there are state leaders. Now, maybe this is a little underappreciated because the same government is quite radically against interfaith marriages, especially interfaith marriages where they think there has been a forced conversion and things like that.

There’s a dichotomy there. It’s not exactly rooted in personal liberty, the way Pramod’s question is hinting at. Maybe that’s why the Uttar Pradesh example goes into the background or is not as well recognized, but there are leaders in India who genuinely support intercaste marriage. I think we don’t need state incentives for that. We just need to have better police and state capacity and stop beating up people when they have intercaste marriages and things like that.

FLOER: His second question: “Is the informal economy a permanent feature due to the nature of India’s democracy, and has it merged with the shadow business of politicians?” He also says, “In cities, we hear of politicians involved in real estate, water supply, garbage mafia, and even allowing footpath encroachments for a fee.”

RAJAGOPALAN: Great question. What is formal and informal basically depends on how costly the rules are to follow, and if the rules are just easier to avoid rather than follow. That depends on two things. One is how terrible the rules are, and second, how rich the country is. Sometimes the rules are terrible, but it still makes sense not to be at the mercy of politicians, and a rich enough city where restaurants are making enough money will just end up paying the fee instead of paying the bribe.

I think that political economy question is yet to be answered. I think the richer the state, the more formal it’ll get. The more formal it gets, the rules start getting relaxed because then following the terrible rules really starts hurting or pinching. I think they are not going to be a permanent feature of the Indian economy. I think, in 50, 60 years, we are not going to have this size of the informal economy. 

Having said that, there’s always going to be some stuff that’s illegal. In the United States, you have a lot of drugs that are illegal that are completely part of the shadow economy or the informal economy. You have a huge secondhand market for guns and all the things that basically are part of the war on drugs, war on crime, that kind of thing. I don’t think we can ever escape an informal or a shadow economy. It just depends on the size of it. I don’t think we’ll have the size of it for a very long time in India.

FLOER: Well, that’s hopeful.

RAJAGOPALAN: I’m hopeful.

FLOER: All right. Next question is from Aditya. They want to know, how do you assess China’s market socialism with large investments in state capacities and strategic sectors under direct state control? Provincial governments increasingly own more shares of SOEs and are nodes of effective redistribution. Why is market socialism not the way ahead?

RAJAGOPALAN: I don’t think China is very market socialist, actually. They rely on pricing. China has a market pricing system within its own economy, and it also has globally competitive prices in which Chinese exports actually do compete and compete very well. I wouldn’t categorize the Chinese economy as market socialist of the old time. I do think that Aditya has a point, and there’s a lot of state intervention, especially in state-owned enterprises. The Chinese government, both at the central level and also at the provincial level, have major investments in state-owned enterprises.

Frankly, I wouldn’t call them a success. I don’t know how many of those are doing well. The question economists always ask is, relative to what? It’s relative to other Chinese firms, which are not state-owned, and also compared to other countries that have state-owned firms. I don’t think they’re doing as well as Chinese firms that are not state owned. 

Even if you look at something like AI, recently everyone said there was the DeepSeek moment and the Manus moment and things like that. Those were not state-owned enterprises. They were a tiny group of finance geeks who got together and said, “I think we need to invest in this,” and managed to hire some great talent, and jigged a very low-cost way of running an LLM or modeling an LLM. That was not at all state owned. A lot of the successes we hear from China don’t end up being state owned.

Having said that, there’s a huge impact of the state. I think where the state industrial policy is most felt is how they subsidize some of their exporters. That’s where their export competitiveness gets even more accentuated by the state interference. It’s also like, state can put Jack Ma in exile or whatever it is that they did to him. It can go either way. I certainly don’t think of the Chinese model as either market socialist, nor do I think of its state-owned enterprise as successes.

FLOER: Next person is Yash. They have two questions, but I think we can condense it into one. It’s about your paper on premature imitation and Mises’ spiral of interventionism. They say, “Given this spiral, why simply delay adoption of interventionism instead of advocating for laissez-faire?”

RAJAGOPALAN: These are good questions. I have a paper on Mises’ interventionism as applied to India’s agriculture. I agree with Yash that the dynamics of interventionism, as Mises talks about in a mixed economy, where the state makes one particular intervention, it distorts prices, and then that leads to the next intervention and the next intervention and so on. Completely agree with Mises there, have written about it, it applies to India. Kudos, Yash, for picking that example.

Now, my paper on premature imitation with Alex Tabarrok doesn’t deny any of this. We are not saying delay the first intervention or delay the next intervention in the Mises scheme of things. What we’re saying instead is that the intervention doesn’t just depend on the demand for it or the kinds of things people like to have in society. People like to have jaywalking laws or anti-jaywalking laws because, you go to a Scandinavian country and they’re like, it sets a bad example for children if adults just cross the street anywhere. It’s a nice-to-have. 

What Alex and I are trying to say is the nice-to-have is only nice-to-have at a particular level of GDP per capita and also state capacity. If you’re going to have all these nice-to-have terrible interventions, even if they don’t lead to the spiral that Mises is talking about, just having that intervention, it’s going to impinge on state capacity and it’s going to create arbitrariness and it’s going to stress or load a system that can’t even handle clean water and picking up the garbage. Let’s not do that.

I don’t think what we’re talking about and what Mises is talking about are necessarily incompatible, but I know what Yash means. We talk about, let’s have presumptive laissez-faire, and get to a point in the development cycle of India, where India can then get to those other laws, but that doesn’t mean I think India should get to those other laws. It just means wait before you evaluate all these nice-to-have laws on maternity and jaywalking and all the Scandinavian cute-to-have laws.

FLOER: Sure. Yash also says, given Mises’s critique of interventionism, in their opinion, the only proper role of a voluntarily funded government is to defend people and their private property against acts of violence, threats of violence, and fraud by others, including the government. He wants to know your thoughts.

RAJAGOPALAN: I do believe in a very limited government, so I don’t think we disagree on that. Everything has to be contextual. We need to think about what the status quo is, Yash. If the status quo is that, in India, we already have this massive redistributive state, then we can’t press a reset button and say, “I’m going to go back to a night watchman state of the 16th-century England or 18th-century England and then just reboot.” Such a reboot system doesn’t exist.

Now the question is, what are the moves available to us as policymakers, and which are the moves we make first to roll back such an extensive welfare state? I think this is where a lot of the work on public choice economics that George Mason is famous for, or some of the stuff I’ve written about with Alex Tabarrok, this is where that stuff comes in, which is, “Hey, can we start picking and choosing each time we’re at the fork in the road on which path we take in the future and also how we roll back some of the excesses of the past?”

FLOER: Sure. We have one question left. This is from an anonymous person. You can answer this however you like. I’m just genuinely curious now that I’ve seen it. “Why doesn’t Shruti like meeting Indian VCs?” I’m assuming that’s venture capitalists?

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. This is probably coming from my recent trip to Bangalore. You know about the Emergent Ventures program, which has been extraordinarily successful. We have more than 1,300 winners across the world. I do the India part of the program. Rashid does Africa and the Caribbean, and Tyler does the rest of the world. The India grants portfolio alone is about 350 winners, so it’s really expanded. Now, in India, it just so happens that a lot of them were for-profits, and a lot of them were deep tech, space tech.

We got in very early. Some of them were teenagers or college dropouts when they started, and we seeded the very early prototype of the idea. Now these guys have gone on to do really well. What I find now is there’s a lot of curiosity amongst venture capitalists in India about, “Hey, what is Emergent Ventures, and why are so many of the good ones coming to us, coming from this weird program called Emergent Ventures?”

They all know Tyler. Tyler’s very well known. I’m less known. I’m certainly not known in VC circles, so I think there’s a lot more curiosity about me, and people just want to meet. Mostly just lack of time. When I’m in India, we have a huge policy docket, there are lots of policy people I’m trying to meet. I have a day job, which is that of an economist; Emergent Ventures is the side hustle. I don’t always have time to meet them.

The other reason is I’ve had some very strange calls with VCs, and this is not just Indian VCs, and no one in particular. They want to know what’s our secret sauce of picking winners. When I try to tell them that there is no secret sauce, I just believe what they’re telling me, and I think they can do it, they think I’m lying to them. They immediately look at me with suspicion, like, “Surely, Shruti has some secret sauce that Tyler has told her. There’s a secret recipe to this, and she’s just not sharing it with us.” I’ve had some strange conversations where I’m like, “Yes, but just believe them when they say they can build a rocket.” They built one already. I funded the prototype.

I have some weird conversations like that. The other thing is, Indian VCs in particular, if there’s a criticism I have for them, it is that they’re run by quants. These are people who the American equivalent would be think of someone who went to MIT and Wharton and has never founded a company, but is clearly super smart, and can crunch numbers, can see patterns, can make phenomenal PowerPoint decks and talk to people and learn deeply about niche areas.

These are the people who are running Indian VCs, and they’re not very founder driven. I feel like they don’t truly understand the founder problems, especially very early stage, because these things can’t be crunched into numbers. I’m also good enough economists to know that you can make numbers say anything you want them to say.

FLOER: Sure.

RAJAGOPALAN: I can give you 16 projections for every EV winner, which may or may not be plausible under certain assumptions. I’m always maybe a little bit more instinct, a little bit less data and scientism and pretense of we know what we’re doing. None of us know what we’re doing. I certainly don’t know what I’m doing, or not all the EV winners know what they’re doing. Imposing a lot of structure and data, and like, “Oh, wow, we’re doing the sophisticated thing of picking winners and losers.” I really don’t think that’s what we’re doing.

Maybe that’s why I don’t hang out with them very much, but I’m happy to meet them if they want to meet me. Some of them are fantastic. VCs are some of the smartest people I’ve met. I’m sure India is no different. The reception from Indian VCs has been a little bit odd as far as I’m concerned. It’s usually just curiosity of how are you doing this?

FLOER: Yes, you need to meet one in the future that doesn’t ask you that question, and then maybe your opinion will change. 

RAJAGOPALAN: No, no, no. I also meet lots of lovely ones. We had a couple of them over. We’ve had Sajith Pai on the podcast. He’s the only one who’s been on the podcast three times. I do meet Indian VCs, I do talk to them, I also have them on the podcast multiple times. There are some Indian VC friends I have who are very smart and very founder-driven. Again, it’s not a group of people I hate or avoid or anything. It’s just EV winners ask me, “Hey, such and such VC funded me. Would you like to meet them?” Usually, I’m like, “Maybe another time. It’s a slightly busy week.”

FLOER: “I’m busy.” Yes. I have heard you and Tyler talk many times about just believing the people that submit applications and taking them seriously, even if it is a teenager in high school who has maybe something not fully developed, but has potential and truly has an idea that they want to pursue. I think that, yes, a lot of people wouldn’t move forward or take them seriously, but you do.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. Actually, I take the teenagers more seriously normally because they’re very uninhibited and they don’t have the usual pretend moves that the rest of us grown-ups make. They’re a little bit raw and unfinished and unfiltered. That’s, I think, a plus because they really do mean what they say. Both Tyler and I have converged on this, that whenever we’ve supported an idea, but we weren’t that sure about the person, that grant hasn’t done very well. When we were absolutely sure about the person, but the idea was half-baked, it still went very well because smart people figure it out and they pivot and they fine-tune and they learn as they make mistakes and so on.

We’re not looking for perfection. We’re looking for just high agency, high ambition. I think the second thing is, for me and Tyler, it’s a lot easier to say this because our explicit mission is to support moonshots where no one knows anything. Whereas if you’re a VC and you have portfolios and you know you need to come up with quarterly numbers and you have to worry about exits, I can imagine they have very different pressures, which is why they behave so differently. I’m not in that business, so I guess I don’t enjoy talking about it. Again, any Indian VCs who are listening to this, I’m happy to speak with you. This is not a blanket no. I’m a little embarrassed.

FLOER: Don’t be embarrassed. That was all of our listener questions. Thanks, everyone.

RAJAGOPALAN: Thank you for listening.

FLOER: I hope I asked your questions appropriately and interpreted them as you wanted them to be asked.

RAJAGOPALAN: Next time, we’d like some women listeners to write in questions, guys.

FLOER: Yes, that would be great. I know you’re out there.

RAJAGOPALAN: We only get male listeners, but I know we have lots of female listeners. You write emails to me. Well, Twitter’s a terrible place for women, but yes.

FLOER: We’ll have an email next time. Yes, maybe something different for people to—

RAJAGOPALAN: Perfect.

FLOER: —submit questions. Awesome. All right. 

Big Themes and Top Episodes

Let’s move on to big themes and top episodes from this year. What do you think the top three from this year were in terms of downloads?

RAJAGOPALAN: I’m just looking at the list. We had some very heavy hitters this year. We have Rajmohan Gandhi, but his is split in two episodes. I have a feeling he’s not in the top because it gets split across two sets of views. If he combined them, he’d be right up there. 

I think Rathin Roy would have done very well, would be my hunch. We had Rakesh Mohan, we had Jasti Chelameswar, we had Ram Guha. Oh my God, we had some incredible people. It must be one of these people is my guess, must have been. Prachi Mishra, she’s huge. Yes, this is roughly the lot. Sorry, I’ve named eight out of the 24 episodes.

FLOER: If you keep going, you’ll name them eventually. No, Rathin Roy was number one, Prachi Mishra was number two. Then we were originally going to record this last month in November, but then we had to reschedule it to December. When I pulled the top, that was last month. I checked today, probably an hour ago, just to make sure the top was still accurate. Number three was Rajmohan Gandhi, specifically the founding fathers episode. Then, when I checked today, it was actually Yamini Aiyar was number three, and she beat Rajmohan by five downloads.

RAJAGOPALAN: Ooh, okay, Yamini, awesome. Again, like the Rajmohan Gandhi, I knew when we were splitting it up in two, we recorded it in two parts because I was worried about imposing on him for three, four hours at a go. I knew the moment we split it up that he wouldn’t be in the top downloaded episode for either one of them, but that’s okay. No, none of this surprises me.

One, I love that Prachi and Yamini are in there. They’re very, very good. I love that it’s all economists, almost. Rathin doesn’t surprise me at all. One, he’s been in the business for a really long time. He has a huge following. He’s a columnist. He’s big on Twitter, all of the usual things that make someone the top episode of the year. I think he also hit on a lot of themes of decentralization, delimitation, migration between states in India. He hit on so many hot-button things that are happening in India right now that I’m not surprised at all that it captured people’s imagination and the zeitgeist.

Prachi Mishra’s episode doing that well really thrills me because she’s a macro dev monetary person, straight out of IMF kind of girl. She’s a phenomenal economist, but she doesn’t chit chat. You ask her a question, she’s going to give you 15 different numbers to contextualize the question. Normally, those episodes, I feel, don’t do quite as well. The fact that her episode did so well just thrills me to no end. 

Same for Yamini. Yamini’s book was fantastic. It was about this crazy experiment that happened in Delhi government schools. Yamini, also someone I’ve known and followed for a long time. Yamini, Rathin, M. R. Sharan, who we had this year, these are the people who really focus on decentralization, fiscal federalism, giving power back in the hands of the people at the state and at the local government level. Those teams doing well doesn’t surprise me at all. I’m really thrilled.

FLOER: Yes, I agree. Yes, they were not unexpected, but it was still nice to see when you look at the numbers, like, “Oh, okay, these are the top three.”

RAJAGOPALAN: Knowing Rajmohan Gandhi as well as I know now, I think I can say that he would be thrilled that there were two young women in the top three and one of them beat him for the third spot. He is very much that very senior scholar who wants younger people to be heard more.

FLOER: Yes, he would be proud.

RAJAGOPALAN: He’d be very proud.

FLOER: I, unfortunately, missed him when he was here in person. I think I was on vacation or something.

RAJAGOPALAN: No, you were moving homes.

FLOER: Oh, yes, I was moving.

RAJAGOPALAN: Those two days that we recorded were the two days that the truck was coming and Dallas was moving from one home to another and then unloading. We literally did back-to-back days with Rajmohan Gandhi. We missed you so much.

FLOER: It was one of those where I was like, “Man, I would have loved to sit in and listen to that,” but life happens. It was still nice to watch when it was released.

RAJAGOPALAN: He was such a nice person.

FLOER: I didn’t meet him obviously, but yes, he seemed through just listening to him. If we go to Rathin Roy, you mentioned this already, but something that particularly stood out to me was his argument that India has become a compensatory state. What do you think listeners connected with there? Has anything since changed your sense of whether India can move toward real earned prosperity rather than state-mediated compensation, especially with the low mobility across states?

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, I think he’s absolutely right. This year, we had elections in the state of Bihar, which is again one of India’s largest and poorest states. It’s got GDP per capita levels of Sierra Leone. In fact, I think Sierra Leone does slightly better than Bihar sometimes. We had elections there, and the election was fought on compensatory politics. The people who won, won on compensatory politics. They didn’t win on genuine economic growth, genuine investment in human capital and prosperity.

I think Rathin was bang on, unfortunately. It’s the worst prediction to come true. On the upside, what Rathin is also highlighting is that the states that are doing well and growing well are genuinely pulling themselves up on the back of people’s aspiration and the demand for economic growth and prosperity. The southern states are doing well. I think one state which has done very well, which used to be a very poor state like Bihar 25 years ago, now is Odisha, which is one of India’s fastest-growing states. It’s done that by industrializing, by increasing the share of manufacturing in its overall state GDP, increasing the share of females employed in the labor force, and so on.

Odisha has done really well. The good news and bad news is Rathin is absolutely right, and also that we can see that the states that don’t do that quite as much, and the states that do focus on economic growth and getting investment and getting labor and employment going, are doing so much better than the states that are not. Actually, the report card is crystal clear. The political report card, people still vote for that kind of politics.

FLOER: Sure. No, that’s fair. With Prachi Mishra, the conversation that you had with her, do you think that it shifted your view on India’s path to sustained inclusive growth? I think some of the biggest constraints that came up were regional inequality, jobs challenge. Or is it something totally different?

RAJAGOPALAN: No, actually, I think one of the loveliest things that Prachi is able to do is just give you such hard and good data on very granular questions. Maybe some of this came up in the podcast, but recently, I was also talking to her off the podcast at someplace that we met at our conference about the state of Bihar, which is where she’s from. She also talked about it on the podcast—the amount of regional disparity within Bihar.

Bihar is one of India’s poorest states. It’s like Sierra Leone, but even within Bihar, there are two or three areas like Patna, the state capital, that do really well. Everywhere else is barely subsistence-level per capita incomes. It’s a nightmare. These are the kinds of per capita incomes you see in war-torn countries, like places that have gone through civil war or a huge natural disaster. This is not a place in central India which has had very stable governance for the last 75 years and not been hampered by war or hurricanes or anything. It’s very strange, but the granularity of the disparity was something—I don’t think it surprised me—but it’s something I constantly learned from Prachi.

FLOER: Yes, you mentioned the Delhi experiment in Yamini’s episode. Is there anything from that experiment that you would try elsewhere or anything that you wouldn’t try ever again?

RAJAGOPALAN: I think the main learning for me from that episode is give power back in the hands of the parents and the students and the teachers. I think that’s an experiment I would conduct anywhere. Now, we live in the United States. If we give power back in the hands of parents, now sometimes it’s going to change curriculum. Sometimes it’s going to look like more school prayer being introduced in the morning, or it’s going to be a lot of controversy over restrooms and labeling restrooms and who gets to use male, female, trans restrooms.

Sometimes it’s going to look like we need to make bigger investments in reading and writing. I think Mississippi is a state that’s really caught up in the United States compared to all the other states and compared to how far behind it used to be. It’s going to look different in different states, but I guess the lesson for me is give power back in the hands of parents, and very good things will happen.

It’s not going to be uniform, and the politics of it might be ugly sometimes, and stuff that you don’t always agree with, but you still need to do that for the best learning outcomes in a particular area.

FLOER: Yes, you and Yamini, when you broke it down, I think it made sense to at least try that again. I don’t know how you do that, but I don’t know if you have thoughts on that, just how you would even start something like that.

RAJAGOPALAN: It’s hard because we’re so polarized right now. Maybe there were always things that were polarized, maybe on other dimensions, but right now, we’re so polarized just on partisan politics, like red team, blue team. It seems like an impossible thing, but maybe we just start with how do we get a better football team? Low stakes, I guess. If any American heard me say football team is low stakes, they’d probably beat me with a stick.

We don’t have to pick the biggest ticket item. We can just start with, “What about remedial classes for better math learning after school?” It could be something relatively apolitical, and then we go from there, is how I would start. I think just a lot more power in the hands of the PTA and fewer bureaucrats making decisions in school boards.

FLOER: We said Rajmohan wasn’t at the top three, but I’m still going to ask you a question about him. He suggested that [Mohandas] Gandhi would have valued inclusion over economic ideology when choosing successors. Do you think that instinct was correct, or do the strains in today’s federal and economic landscape point to lessons we missed from figures like C. Rajaji?

RAJAGOPALAN: That’s a great question. I really don’t know the answer to that, but that’s a really great question. First of all, I have to start with having Rajmohan Gandhi here in the studio with us, I think was the highlight of my year, maybe the highlight of my life. It was unbelievable. I had to reread all of his work. I feel like I’ve been prepping for that episode my entire life, but I speed read some of the older books and got there quickly, and I must have read 16 or 17, all of his books, basically.

I started seeing a few patterns in them of him as a biographer, which we can talk about in a minute, but I think he is a very interesting person, also the product of his time. He was born in pre-independent India. He’s seen independence and partition. A lot of the people for whom he’s a biographer, he’s actually met them in person.

FLOER: Sure.

RAJAGOPALAN: He’s been a biographer to both his grandfathers. And I think I would trust his instinct on Mohandas Gandhi’s alignment with inclusivity over economic ideology. I would not question him on that. I think he would be bang on. I think he would also be the first to highlight that we missed a lot of lessons from Rajaji. Rajmohan Gandhi is not a classical liberal like me or like Rajaji, but he does see the value in dismantling License Permit Raj and economic liberalization, and just how much bottom-up economic growth it brought for people and how it helped us alleviate poverty. One of the most remarkable things about him as a scholar, also, is he’s not dogmatic.

He’s able to look at evidence and say, “Hey, this evidence bears outright and also takes us closer to the vision of what we had for India and for Indians, which is more prosperity, more dignity, more agency.” All of that has to come on the backs of getting out of survival mode and actually getting into some kind of, we have basic living standards, and from there we go on to be whoever we wish to be. I think on both those things, Rajmohan Gandhi would agree with you. And I think I would agree with him on both how he thinks about what M. K. Gandhi would have done and what Rajaji would have done, yes. It’s hard to say.

FLOER: Sure. Yes, that was maybe a heavy-weighted question.

RAJAGOPALAN: No, I think it’s the kind of question I would have asked him, and it’s hard.

FLOER: Yes, it’s true. There was one episode in particular that didn’t make the top, but it was being talked about on Twitter quite a bit, and I would notice it when I would go and check the mentions. The one with Chitrakshi Jain and Prashant Reddy T.

RAJAGOPALAN: Oh, yes.

FLOER: That one had chatter for months after it released. What do you think made the dysfunction feel so startling in that episode, even to close observers? Has your view shifted on whether awareness is enough to drive reform or whether the system’s incentives trap is keeping us in the status quo?

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, that episode was so much fun. I’ll tell you what I get when I get the listener feedback. They love when I get outraged. I don’t know why. A lot of the stuff that Chitrakshi and Prashant were talking about was outrageous, like judges at district-level courts should not be treated the way that they are treated. The system has terrible incentives. It’s almost like there’s this crazy caste system from colonial times, which is still overwhelming in our judicial system.

I think a lot of the dysfunction is well known. There’s a lovely TV show on Netflix. It’s called Maamla Legal Hai. It’s Hindi, but it can be subtitled, and it’s hilarious if you ever want to watch a funny Indian show which is full of craziness. That talks a lot about some of these broken incentives, or at least it makes it vivid. I think some of these pathologies were well known, but the reasons were not well known. Kudos to them for putting it in a book. The book is also very readable, and it’s doing really well. I saw it at airports when I was recently in India.

FLOER: That’s great.

RAJAGOPALAN: I was so happy that it was doing well. Maybe that’s also part of the reason for the chatter. I don’t think this can just get fixed by more information. I think we need to have some serious law commissions, judicial commissions. We need to relook at how we hire, promote, fire district-level judges, first-class judges, magistrates. We need to actually create a more incentive-compatible system that’s not people right at the top acting like they’re puppet masters and pulling strings. I think that’s definitely true.

The overall idea of their book was so simple, but so important. For most people in India, the district court is the first layer of the judiciary that they interact with. It’s pretty appalling.

FLOER: Sure.

RAJAGOPALAN: Right?

FLOER: Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: Anyone who’s had experience, even a little bit, most people in elite circles end up experiencing this if their parents die intestate or they have to get their estate through probate or something like that. That’s usually when my elite friends of my age group interact with the system. They are like, “Wow, this was such a nightmare.” That’s when we wake up to that reality. I think there are also lots of people who have engaged with the system. They couldn’t just catapult into the Supreme Court, and they realize how bad it is. It was a very fun episode.

FLOER: It was, yes. Their work is important. All right. Let’s move on to our final segment, where we’ll talk about some personal moments from this year and then also look forward into 2026.

RAJAGOPALAN: Awesome.

Personal Moments 

FLOER: Which conversation genuinely surprised you or changed your thinking this year? Was there any moment where maybe you were delighted by an answer, or maybe again, yes, you had a strong reaction? 

RAJAGOPALAN: Oh, yes. You said surprised, delighted, and learned something or changed my mind, right?

FLOER: Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: Okay. I have different answers for all of them. I was very delighted by Rajmohan Gandhi when he would describe details of like the lengths he went to meet the women in Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s life, or Patel’s wife, just even trying to figure out a basic sketch of her. I was very charmed by that because when I normally think of a biographer, I just think of them sitting in the archives, and he knew these people, but he also treated them as real people, and some were his family members.

To that extent, I was so delighted by how much effort went into balancing what work he does as a scholar in the archives, but also the human lens brought to bear about these are real people with real lives, and there are other people involved, and we need to capture it. I was very delighted by that.

One thing I genuinely learnt was, Rakesh Mohan was again in the studio this year. He’s an absolute giant. He’s been in Mercatus before. You met him. He’s the most delightful—

FLOER: Yes, he’s very nice.

RAJAGOPALAN: —brilliant, charming human being, and he talked at one point about how he was trying to get the labor mills that are closed down in Ahmedabad to get revived and bring in investment into that area and change it up a little bit, and he talked about how he was meeting Arvind Bhai Buch, who was the labor union leader and this Gandhian leader, and how he was trying to stitch together a fund where there would be money put in for all the laborers who had been laid off because of the mill closings or something, and then something to tide them over before the new investment kicked in to revive that region.

That was a major learning because we all read Gordon Tullock’s paper on transitional gains traps and how you transition from system 1 to system 2, and how reforms are so sticky, and he actually gave us a real-life example of how he was trying to solve the transitional gains trap. That was super. It was something that really changed my mind, that it’s not important to just point out what the problems are.Someone has to roll up their sleeves, go talk to labor union leaders and people on the ground, and spend months there, create a fund. He was very inspiring there. 

Then the stuff I was delighted by, there were many moments I was delighted by. We had Jasti Chelameswar, who’s now a retired Supreme Court justice. He’s amazing, and he’s also got a dry sense of humor. I may not remember verbatim, but I was talking to him about what he thinks about Supreme Court’s jurisprudence and how the court is interfering more and more in legislative decisions, which is not the norm at all. I was asking him to comment on this change in Supreme Court’s jurisprudence, and he said, “Shruti, what jurisprudence are you talking about? There is no jurisprudence.”

I don’t remember exactly what he said, but it hinted to, “There’s no meeting of minds and developing a strong body or jurisprudence, as you would imagine this elevated court to be doing; they’re just making stuff up as they go along.” It was surprising and delightful and scary and all of it at the same time. 

I think another moment that truly delighted me was in the conversation with Ramachandra Guha. He had written this book on biographies of Indian environmentalists, and there was Raj Kamal Mukherjee, who was basically talking about a lot of the Elinor Ostrom-esque sort of bottom-up Bloomington School ideas before Elinor Ostrom, like decades before her. I remember asking him about, doesn’t he seem like Elinor Ostrom before Elinor Ostrom? He’s like, “That’s exactly right.” That was another happy, delightful moment where I was like, “Oh, these ideas have been around, and we just need people to rediscover them at different points.”

There was a history of this kind of thought in India, and we just lost it, and now we’re finding it again. These were some of the delightful things. Sorry, so you asked me for something that changed my mind, something that surprised me, and stuff that delighted me. I think I covered all of them, right?

FLOER: I think so.

RAJAGOPALAN: Awesome. I can keep going otherwise. You have to stop me, Dallas.

Looking to 2026

FLOER: No, that was awesome. This year, we recorded over 20 episodes, spanning economics, law, history, music, technology. We could go on. What major topics or perspectives were not present this year that you would hope that you would want to talk about next year?

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, this is a good question. I feel like we are not looking, at least I’m not reading enough about some of the more specific markets, like financial markets, insurance markets, pensions. These are big-ticket items. They are very specific, highly specialized. They have their own regulatory boards. I guess I’ve just been lazy. I just need to sit down, do some reading, and—

FLOER: I don’t know if you’ve been lazy.

RAJAGOPALAN: —figure out. No, but what I mean is it takes some effort to deep-dive into an area that I haven’t studied recently or haven’t studied ever. In that sense, I’ve been a little bit lazy, but I do want to learn a lot more about insurance markets, health insurance, all kinds of insurance, actually, about pension reform, about India’s financial regulators. They’ve been in the news a lot. Things like that, definitely. I think more on food. We’ve only done a couple of episodes on food, so I think I would like to do more on food.

If there are people writing about food, please come back. Then I feel like I haven’t read enough about India’s northeastern region. These are India’s hilly states which border with Nepal, Bhutan, China, Bangladesh, and Myanmar. That’s the northeastern edge of India. There are seven states, eight if you include Sikkim. These are just places I haven’t visited in a while.

I don’t know enough about them. I’m looking for book recommendations to read more on them. I typically invite guests based on what I’m reading. I’m hoping to read more about these themes in the next year. I’m hoping more of these people appear on the podcast if they’re happy to come. That’s my list. Do you have requests, Dallas? Other things you’d like to learn more about?

FLOER: I don’t want to be like a broken record, but I think just more AI would be interesting, specifically from an India lens, I think, is different than what we are typically getting.

RAJAGOPALAN: We know the AI gurus in India. I can ask them to come on the podcast.

FLOER: Yes, and then just other, I guess, frivolous things like food, music. That’s the stuff I always like, stuff that’s outside of the—

RAJAGOPALAN: It’s not frivolous.

FLOER: —economic bread-and-butter.

RAJAGOPALAN: It’s the main thing.

FLOER: No, it’s true.

RAJAGOPALAN: It’s everything. No, I agree with you. The music episodes, I have enormous fun, food, even travel, actually. Maybe we’ll do a couple of people who travel. You know Paul Salopek?

FLOER: Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: I will take credit. I introduced him to Tyler.

FLOER: Oh, look at that.

RAJAGOPALAN: More stuff like that would be super interesting.

FLOER: Yes, I agree.

RAJAGOPALAN: We will try to include that, Dallas.

FLOER: Awesome. To anyone listening, if you have suggestions, you’re always welcome to send them our way. We’ll take a look at them.

RAJAGOPALAN: If you are publishers or book writers, please send the books. I read all the stuff that comes my way. I try to include everyone.

Hope or Concern for Next Generation

FLOER: Awesome. All right. Job market series, we do it every year, as everyone knows, focuses on early career scholars focusing on research in India. What gives you hope or concern about the next generation studying India?

RAJAGOPALAN: The hope is, one, they’re just so bright. They’re amazing. I love reading the stuff of younger scholars. The way they look at problems and the way they choose problems is so much about their lived experience in India, which is very different from my lived experience in India, because, at this point, some of us are 15 years apart. What gives me hope is just them. They’re very, very good. They’re very brilliant. 

The other thing that gives me hope is just how specialized they are. We need this kind of deep lens in monetary economics or in development economics, or in trade, or whatever it is that we’re looking at. I love that. I love the new techniques. I have to learn a lot more about AI because they’re using AI tools.

FLOER: Sure.

RAJAGOPALAN: Or I have to learn about RCTs because they’re using RCTs. Those are the things that typically give me hope. It also gives me hope that, well, I don’t know if this is hopeful or concerning, but when they say, “We’ve grown up listening to you,” or “You were part of our journey in graduate school,” it’s a little bit scary, but it’s also like, “Oh, wow, we’re all in this together.” They’re very generous. They’re very much part of a broader network of scholars. Those things give me hope.

What concerns me is, honestly, the academic job market’s just not been doing well. It’s dried up in the US to a large extent. The Indian academic job market is also not doing as well because in different state universities, there are different constraints. Some people think there’s a lot of government interference. There’s a lot of issues with academic free speech, but also just we’re not hiring in the numbers that we were hiring.

Young scholars need to get incubated for an eight-, 10-year period. I hope all of them get incubated, and we’ll certainly support them in any way we can in and outside the podcast. I guess that’s the concern that I hope they allmake it in the fields that they want to make it in.

Intellectual Mood Around India

FLOER: Right. Relatedly to that, how would you characterize the intellectual mood around India, especially this past year?

RAJAGOPALAN: Oh, wow. This is a great question. It started out with India being very nervous with the Trump tariffs and the crazy. This is not just India; this is everyone. With India, there was an added layer of drama, let’s say, because India is an ally; it’s part of the Quad. Trump literally went on a war singling India out, saying that there are unfair trade practices, which was bizarre, and then made all kinds of concessions to China. Then India had to do this weird pivot, and I was very worried that India will pivot on liberalization because the Trump administration made a boo-boo when it came to India and Russia and their trade.

Luckily, India found its feet. One, I think it dealt with the questions really well, started streamlining its tariffs and its tax system. There were some big reforms there. Then it announced labor law reforms more recently. This is stuff that Kadambari and I have worked on, like so many of us in our community have worked on. India has, I think, started figuring out that no matter what happens outside in the world, it needs to get its house in order.

Shruti and Animals

FLOER: Sure. Pivoting a little bit to you. Last year, one of your goals was to hang out with more animals. Did you do that?

RAJAGOPALAN: I can’t believe you remember that.

FLOER: Yes. Did you do that this year?

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, I did.

FLOER: Did you accomplish it?

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. Okay. Now we’re really going to talk about the funnest parts of my year. I did do that. Last year, it started with, we had Emergent Ventures in Kochi. I think we spoke after that, right?

FLOER: I think so, yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: I hung out with elephants in Kerala.

FLOER: Yes, you showed me the pictures too, which were incredible.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, which is fun, and then I went to Masai Mara this year, which has been on the bucket list since I was eight years old, I think. You know this about me. I love animals. I don’t go to zoos. I don’t use leather. I’m one of those people. For me, to truly be with animals doesn’t mean going to a zoo. It means hanging with them where they are the ones that are free, and we are behind bars in a Jeep or something.

It finally happened this year. It was incredible. It was the greatest experience of my life. It’s probably top three greatest travel experiences, up there with Sistine Chapel or walking on a glacier or something like that. Really, really up there. I must have met hundreds of elephants. I have some great pictures. Also, thanks to you because you were telling me how to get the camera and use the camera. 

FLOER: Yes, we briefed before.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, you briefed me. I was like, “I’ve never been happier about Mercatus having such a great podcast team.” Dallas is a fabulous photographer. In fact, we use Dallas for photographs when we do internal events and stuff like that. She takes everyone’s headshots, a different kind of animal, but Dallas is an awesome photographer.

FLOER: Sam helps with that as well.

RAJAGOPALAN: I got lots of tips from you, and I can’t explain it. I hung out with giraffes. I have hung out with so many elephants, and I have more baby elephant pictures than any normal person should have. And lions. The only animal I couldn’t catch of the Big Five is the rhino, which basically just means I have to go back, and I will. 

Then we had Emergent Ventures in Ghana this year. I was in Ghana for EV, but before that, we went to one of the national parks in Ghana. I hung out with elephants there. Tyler and I were looking at this elephant, and we had seen the same elephant the previous day, and I was like, “Is this Tumi?” I think that was the name. Tyler’s like, “You know the elephants by their name, and you can recognize them?”

FLOER: “It’s very important to me.” 

RAJAGOPALAN: I was like, “Of course I can. Human beings, I might forget, but elephants I remember.” I did spend more time with elephants and other wild animals. I started learning how to ride horses this year, which, dear listeners, don’t start when you’re 41 years old. It hurts everywhere, but it’s been a joy. I spend a lot of time hanging out with horses. Once a week, I try to get a riding lesson in, if I’m not traveling.

I love horses. Horses are just meditative and peaceful. My husband makes fun of me that I look happier after cleaning out a stable and grooming a horse than I’ve ever looked with any human being. It’s a bit funny. When we were in Bangalore for the week of conferences, I went riding three, four times a week because they have an excellent riding school nearby. I spent lots of time with animals. Yay.

FLOER: Horses are majestic.

RAJAGOPALAN: I know. You said you want to start learning how to ride, too?

FLOER: Yes, I did horseback riding, God, it was maybe over 10 years ago at this point. I really loved it, and I just never did it again, not for any reason, but yes, it’s one of those things that I think it would bring me great joy as well. I’d like to try it again.

RAJAGOPALAN: Let’s do it. We should do a lesson together.

FLOER: Yes, let’s do it.

RAJAGOPALAN: We’ll figure something out, or maybe we just go trail-riding when the frost eases up. It’s freezing here in Virginia. Maybe we’ll do that. They have those trail rides in Shenandoah Park. I think they’re for couples and for engagement pictures, but you and I could do it.

FLOER: Yes, we could go.

RAJAGOPALAN: Right? That would be fun.

FLOER: Just two friends horseback riding. 

RAJAGOPALAN: Two friends married to other people. 

What’s New for 2026

FLOER: Right, exactly. Cool. All right. What is next for you in 2026?

RAJAGOPALAN: Ah, this is something super exciting, you know this has been in the works, and our colleagues at Mercatus have been working on this. We’ve launched a new fellowship called the 1991 Fellowship. Just some background on this for you, Dallas. For instance, if I want to know what’s happening in the state of Madhya Pradesh or the state of Sikkim, 15 years ago, I had no one to call and ask these questions.

I’m like, “It’s 15 years later, and I still don’t have one amazing young expert in every state that I can just call and ask about land or labor or energy pricing or environmental policy or something.” I think I just figured that if we have to make this happen, we just have to do it ourselves, which is, again, a very Mercatus sort of ethos, like, “If it needs to be done, just do it.” We are very good at spotting talent, and at fellowships; we have more than 600 fellows across different fellowships, which are academic, starting from high school to college to university.

You can find all those details on the Mercatus website, and the deadlines are coming up soon. If anyone’s listening and wants to apply to those, those are great. We didn’t have anything specific to India, and we didn’t have anything specific to policy, but in all these other fellowships, we saw lots of Indian talent and Indian origin talent applying. The goal for this fellowship, and it’s a big experiment for Mercatus, is to have these fellows based in India. They will be working at the state level.

They’ll pick a state and a set of policies in a given state, and they’ll just work on that, and we’ll just incubate them. The idea is not for Mercatus to tell them what they should work on. It’s always just pick the right talent and support them in a way that they can figure out what they want to work on. We’re going to put a call out for applications in a couple of weeks. You’ll hear about it on this podcast and on X and all the other social media channels.

If you know people who are young, smart, who want to work in India on Indian policy, especially at the state level, please ask them to apply. The goal is very much to look for the next generation of policy thinkers, doers, leaders who are young and who need support and incubation to get started, which is not easily forthcoming at the state level, always.

FLOER: Well, it’s very exciting. I’m excited for it to launch.

RAJAGOPALAN: I’m excited for them to meet you. The way we have the emerging scholars do all the workshops with you and Sam on how to communicate, I think Mercatus is awesome at setting up communication platforms, whether it’s MRU, whether it’s all the podcasts that you guys do. I’m excited for them to meet you, too. Hopefully, at one of our meetups, you can meet them. I have to finally get you to India.

FLOER: Yes, one day.

RAJAGOPALAN: One day. Not in December. I know December’s the worst month for you. We’ll do something in India, not in December, and we will drag you to the other end of the world.

FLOER: That would be great, trying to balance just end-of-year stuff, the hectic podcast schedule and going to India.

The Ideas of India Team

RAJAGOPALAN: This is a good place for me to ask you. Can you tell the listeners everything you do? Because my listeners only know you as my producer, and that’s the tiniest part of Dallas’s workday. I try to make it a lot, but I can’t succeed. She does 50 other things. Why don’t you walk us through everything you guys do?

FLOER: All right. Strap in because there’s a lot. We produce all of the podcasts that are, obviously, Mercatus-produced. We also support some, to a certain extent, that are independently run by scholars. Rebecca Lowe, for example, has a podcast. She is producing it all by herself, but we have given her the training that she needs to do it. We, also, are thinking about or starting to give her more support, just because her download numbers are really great, and we want to create clips for her and other things that we can do to help her boost the podcast.

RAJAGOPALAN: She’s amazing.

FLOER: She is, yes, she’s great. That’s one part.

RAJAGOPALAN: And the only philosopher I can understand.

FLOER: Yes. No, she breaks things down, yes, to a point where it’s digestible, and I do appreciate that.

RAJAGOPALAN: Wait, tell us about all the podcasts. You do CWT, you do Macro Musings, you do Ideas for India. What else?

FLOER: Those are our big three.

RAJAGOPALAN: Alex, The Marginal Revolution Podcast?

FLOER: Oh, yes. Marginal Revolution Podcast, that is seasonal. We just wrapped up the second season. That is nice because we don’t have to do it all year round. We will do a season of it every year. Likely, we’ll have the third season next fall. 

I don’t oversee these, but we also have Hayek Program Podcast and then Virtual Sentiments with Kristen Collins. Then, yes, I think the biggest thing that’s just coming up is more scholars want to do stuff on their Substack, which is either short-form video or it’s their own podcast or something with visual media. We’re supporting Henry Oliver in that way.

RAJAGOPALAN: Revana, who’s amazing, Jack Salmon.

FLOER: Yes, there’s Revana. The list is endless at this point, and that’s why I’m having a hard time even remembering them all because there are so many. That’s the podcast side. Then, on top of that, I also led the Emerging Scholars training program this year, where our Emerging Scholars came in September. We basically put them through an eight-week course of learning how to communicate, learning how to interface with policymakers, short-form video, tips for writing, [etc].

That was all of the strategic engagement team helping with that. We just ran them through that. Then at the end of it, we did Mercatus’s Got Talent, where they did a short presentation about either their research or something that they’re thinking about right now.

RAJAGOPALAN: They’re awesome. I miss Mercatus’s Got Talent, but they are just awesome. I run into them all the time in the office, and they’re amazing.

FLOER: Seeing them go from week one to week eight was really great.

RAJAGOPALAN: Isn’t that amazing?

FLOER: Yes, and just seeing it up in front of people, too, and presenting is also, I think, the cherry on top. It shows people like, “Oh, no, they really put the work in, and they really developed their skills over this time.” There’s that. Then it’s just general project management of stuff that the strategic engagement team is doing. Yes, I’m all over the place, but I enjoy it.

RAJAGOPALAN: Anything that requires communication, audio, and video, somehow, we manage to involve you. When we do annual reports, thank you’s to donors, anything we record on video, I don’t know, you’re involved. At least, I don’t know if that’s just me. You’re the only person who is trusted with me, so they send you. I don’t know.

FLOER: No, yes, I’m definitely the first person that they at least ask.

RAJAGOPALAN: I have no doubt.

FLOER: It’s like, “How can we do this?” Yes, if it’s something that Mercatus can produce and do, then yes, you work with me. You work with Sam. Sometimes we say, “Oh, no, I think it would be better if you thought about it this way,” and then they involve other teams at Mercatus.

RAJAGOPALAN: No, but our communication game is pretty good, and in a very large part because of the podcast. It’s amazing to me how many people know of Tyler just as a podcaster.

FLOER: I know.

RAJAGOPALAN: It’s hilarious, actually, right?

FLOER: Yes, and that’s shifted, too, since I’ve been here. In the beginning, it was, “Oh, he does Marginal Revolution.”

RAJAGOPALAN: That shifted because you’ve been here.

FLOER: Oh, yes, I think so. Yes, totally. It’s because he’s been consistent with the podcast.

RAJAGOPALAN: It’s amazing.

FLOER: He’s had great guests. It’s all of it.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. No, so the listeners know this. I love Dallas. Dallas makes my life incredibly easy. I realized recently, I hardly talk about you.

FLOER: Really?

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, because I don’t have to think about anything when it comes to you. I feel like I just send emails and land troubles in your inbox, and then I forget about them because it’s like, “Oh, Dallas will take care of this.” I apologize if I’m abusing all my privileges.

FLOER: No, of course not.

RAJAGOPALAN: Really, you’re the coolest, easiest person to work with.

FLOER: Oh, thank you.

RAJAGOPALAN: Also, you guys can’t see this because it’s an audio show, but Dallas has the best style in the office.

FLOER: Oh, well, that’s very nice. Thank you.

RAJAGOPALAN: Actually, the entire production team, you guys are very spiffy.

FLOER: Yes. The creative teams are usually the ones, yes, that are bringing the style or the trends.

RAJAGOPALAN: You and Sam are putting us to shame in our navy blues and blacks every day in the office.

FLOER: Hey, I’m wearing navy blue pants today.

RAJAGOPALAN: I’m in all black.

FLOER: All black is a classic.

RAJAGOPALAN: Thank you so much, Dallas, for doing this, and you have a huge team supporting you.

Thank You’s

FLOER: Yes. I will list everyone who has helped. I want to thank the entire team. That’s our producers, copyeditors, audio editors, marketing folks. That is Jeff Holmes, Sam Alburger, Kendra Strawderman, Houston Beckworth, Mary Horan, Christina Behe, Beata Nas, Aakrith Harikumar, Katie Jester, Jen Whisler, Shreyas Narla, Kadambari Shah, and Ankita Dinkar, everyone else in Mercatus and beyond who has helped in small ways as well. Can’t thank you enough. Shruti, thanks again for doing this.

RAJAGOPALAN: Thank you, Dallas. The one person I have to thank is Dallas. She already mentioned Sam, but they’re the two people I typically work with the most when it comes to doing the podcast. Everyone else on the team, the India team members who are mentioned here, all send recommendations and send me links when I’m frantically checking out the transcript in the end and stuff like that. Every single person who works on this is just amazing. We’re able to put out a pretty high-quality thing out there, and it’s shaping people’s lives. It’s making PhD students listen to it and come full circle when they’re on the job market. It’s been an awesome ride.

FLOER: I think all these people need to be shouted out individually. I’ll keep it short. Jeff is Shruti’s strategic engagement team lead. He is involved in all things Shruti, so can’t thank him enough for his work. Sam, as you mentioned, he helps with production. He’s great. Kendra, she has started this year at Mercatus, and she wasn’t supposed to do production things, but she volunteered to help, and so she has helped with recordings and creating clips.

RAJAGOPALAN: She’s awesome.

FLOER: Yes, can’t thank her enough.

RAJAGOPALAN: Also, another person with fabulous style. Kendra, shout out to you.

FLOER: Yes, good job, Kendra. Houston, he edits all of the episodes.

RAJAGOPALAN: And he’s also David’s son. We’re putting the kids to work.

FLOER: Passing the torch. Mary Horan helps with some of our copyediting for the transcripts. Christina and Beata manage most of them, so can’t thank them enough. Aakrith was actually our intern this past year. He’s gone now, but he worked on a lot.

RAJAGOPALAN: He might come back to do some stuff for the India program, actually.

FLOER: Oh, awesome.

RAJAGOPALAN: He’s amazing.

FLOER: Yes, he helped with some of the transcripts this past fall, so yes, he was great to work with. Katie Jester, she does our socials, so anytime we’re on social media, that is Katie behind the screen.

RAJAGOPALAN: She’s awesome.

FLOER: She’s great. Jen Whisler, she’s also helping with emails and just other general marketing things. Thank you, Jen.

RAJAGOPALAN: Jen is also like you. All the women that you hear about on this list are the most organized people in the world, and they literally could hold the world up together.

FLOER: I think so, but I don’t know if we want to. We definitely could.

RAJAGOPALAN: You, Katie, Jen, Christina, Beata, you guys are just unbelievable. It’s unreal.

FLOER: Thank you. Then Shreyas helps with every single episode behind the scenes with the transcript and getting things scheduled, so can’t thank him enough. Him and Kadambari are actually starting some really exciting projects that I won’t spoil too much, but I’m working with them on those, and I’m excited to see where those go. Then, Ankita, I don’t work with her too much closely, but I know you guys work with her all the time, and she helps out.

RAJAGOPALAN: I do all the prep myself because I have no other way of figuring out how to delegate the prep. What they are amazing at is just sending me new things to read, new voices. “Hey, this book has come out. Have you read this?” They flood me with new information. They’re my eyes and ears out there. They’re amazing, and also with the transcript, right?

The transcript is a labor of love, and it’s in so many classrooms now. Recently, I heard there’s Rohit Chandra—who we must have, actually. I should invite him. We met him at the conference, and he gave an amazing talk. He said, “Oh, I use your transcript on XYZ episode in my classroom.”

FLOER: Oh, awesome.

RAJAGOPALAN: This is at IIT Delhi. Our transcripts are now making it to very interesting places, so I’m just so happy that this is happening to us. The transcripts are a huge labor of love. All the links, all the tiny details, all the ridiculous Indian pronunciations, they come in last minute, and they help troubleshoot and clean it up. Big thanks to you, Dallas, for managing all of this and 50 other things. You are undoubtedly one of my favorite people in general and to work with, and this was another awesome year.

FLOER: Thanks, Shruti. I’m excited for next year.

RAJAGOPALAN: Me too, and for the 1991 fellowship, and everything you do.

FLOER: Yes. Excited to keep doing this.