Former Executive Director, IMF for India, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Sri Lanka. Economist, cricket junkie, policy wonk, and film (all woods, old and new) enthusiast
New Delhi, India
Joined January 2013
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Surjit Bhalla retweeted
I have to say, after years of listening to Democrats call Trump supporters cultists who blindly follow their leader and punish anyone who steps out of line, watching the reaction to Haley Stevens today has been incredible.
She refused to support a candidate whose views she finds morally repugnant. She gave him multiple opportunities to address her concerns, and ultimately decided that she couldn't support him. She even went so far as to endorse his Republican opponent.
And the entire Democratic establishment lost its mind.
What exactly do these people think Stevens has to gain from this?
She's not going to become a Republican. She's not going to suddenly find herself welcomed into conservative politics. She's damaged her standing with her own party, alienated people she has worked alongside for years, and has likely destroyed whatever political future she had with Democrats.
You can disagree with her decision or think she made a terrible political calculation. But I find it very difficult to look at someone willingly accepting those consequences and conclude that she's doing it for personal gain.
I have disagreed with Stevens on plenty of things, and I expect I will continue to disagree with her. But I have a tremendous amount of respect for someone who is willing to take a stand when it actually costs them something.
Abdul El-Sayed is one of the most transparently dishonest politicians I've watched in a long time.
He constantly tells people he's Michigan First. He wants to talk about Michigan, he cares about Michigan, his priority is Michigan.
Fine. Then why does he spend so much time talking about Gaza?
Watch the clip below. This man brings up Palestinians and Israel constantly. He has absolutely no problem making foreign affairs part of his political identity. But the second someone challenges him on what he's saying, suddenly he doesn't want to discuss foreign policy anymore. He's running to represent Michigan, you see.
Mamdani does exactly the same thing in New York. They get to make whatever inflammatory statements they want about Israel, but when someone asks them to defend those statements, we're told that they're focused on their constituents and have more important things to worry about.
How convenient.
El-Sayed wants Michigan voters to believe that American aid to Israel is somehow standing between them and affordable groceries, rent, and healthcare.
We're talking about a minuscule fraction of federal spending. Cutting it would accomplish absolutely nothing for the average Michigan household.
But ask him about spending American taxpayer money on UNRWA or other international organizations, and suddenly the concern about money leaving Michigan seems to disappear.
I would genuinely love to hear a journalist ask him why American dollars going to Israel are an affordability crisis while American dollars going to organizations he supports are perfectly acceptable.
It's such an obvious question. And yet he gets to keep repeating this nonsense.
I don't expect politicians to agree with me about Israel. I don't even care if they particularly like Israel. But I do expect them to be able to defend their own positions without hiding behind generic slogans every time someone asks a difficult question.
And what I find especially revealing about today's reaction is how little room the Democratic Party seems willing to allow for someone who draws a moral line in a place the party doesn't approve of.
We've long been told that Republicans are incapable of independent thought, that dissent is punished, that loyalty to the party matters more than principle.
Well, look at what happened to Haley Stevens today.
Whatever you think of her decision, she made it knowing exactly how her party would react.
And they went ahead and proved her right.
Surjit Bhalla retweeted
Personally, I think it was a mistake for the @BJP4India Govt, to stop all the perks and housing benefits received by the Indian media from the govt, after it came to power in 2014. It has earned the BJP & the RSS, the unremitting hostility of the legacy media and its Woke counterparts abroad!
I am afraid you misunderstood what i said, deliberate or otherwise - there is a great line in Cool Hand Luke - Paul Newman character - What we have here is a failure to communicate!
@surjitbhalla Dr Bhalla, you yourself has said last night that Govt should come out with its own credible poverty data which we can then compare. So, that's it.
Agree - but why isn't this common sense?
Surjit Bhalla retweeted
"Modi' good fortune, though not India’s, is that the main opposition party, Congress, led by Rahul Gandhi offers no compelling rival vision for creating jobs. Nor does any figure in the BJP yet threaten Mr Modi. The result is that this septuagenarian, like the one running China, shows no serious sign of refreshing his government".
Many individuals around the world , including Amartya Sen have tried to define a standard - that was the point of my challenge - YOU define the standard (can be borrowed from an infinity of others) and let us debate and discuss
The decline in extreme poverty numbers maybe credible @surjitbhalla but I think @over2shailaja does have a point: we may need a credible standard of living index that may give a better sense of where we are in terms of transforming the lives of millions. Another more focused discussion (not debate) soon!🙏👍
Please add an explanation as to why you think the decline is not credible, that will make your comment credible; define your OWN poverty measure & happy to discuss with you, & @sardesairajdeep , how India has performed over the last 40 years (1983-2023); open invitation
On @IndiaToday at 9pm,Surjit Bhalla and Santosh Mehrotra debate the World Bank's claim that extreme poverty in India has fallen to 2.6%. Both are distinguished economists, but the viewer is left none the wiser. Is the decline credible?
A person may have escaped extreme hunger and destitution but still be unable to afford adequate nutrition, housing, transport, healthcare or education. Such a person is no longer extremely poor but remains economically vulnerable.
The two economists kept taking swipes at each other and even the anchor( !!) but
the question is which measure is appropriate for the claim being made.
The issue that Bhalla and Mehrotra should have explained to viewers is:
Has India merely reduced extreme destitution, or has it enabled most Indians to achieve a minimally acceptable standard of living?
Surely a TV debate should help ordinary viewers understand what these figures mean, rather than leave them to decide which economist sounds more convincing.
Surjit Bhalla retweeted
Stanford University student Elsa Johnson became a target of the Chinese Communist Party in 2024.
Elsa attended a private school as a child with a heavy focus on foreign languages and became fluent in Mandarin Chinese while still in elementary school. Years later after she was accepted to Stanford, she studied international relations and researched Chinese industry and military tactics while working at the Hoover Institution on campus.
She soon came to the attention of members of the Chinese Communist Party, which has a heavy presence at Stanford and throughout Southern California. There are currently more than 1,000 Chinese students attending Stanford each year, and the university has received more than $64,000,000 in private donations from Chinese individuals and organizations since 2010.
In June 2024, a man claiming to be a fellow Stanford student named Charles Chen contacted her online. She was not initially suspicious as they had many mutual associates, and his photos and posts appeared to be centered on campus. But his questions and requests quickly put her on edge as he invited her on a paid trip to China. And he seemingly knew details about her that she had never shared with him.
When she tried to disengage with him, she began receiving threatening phone calls by Chinese speakers. Elsa contacted Stanford administrators and the FBI, who told her Charles was likely affiliated with the Ministry of State Security, had been posing as a Stanford student for years, and had targeted at least ten other female students since 2020 in a similar manner. They also told her she was under physical surveillance on campus by the Chinese Communist Party.
Elsa wrote articles in the Stanford Review and The Free Press about Chinese influence on campus, and in March 2026 testified about espionage threats on college campuses before the House Committee on Education and Workforce.
For episode 270 of the Spycraft 101 podcast I spoke with Elsa about being targeted by a foreign government right in the middle of a US college campus. The episode is available now.
#stanford #college #student #china #hooverinstitute
open.spotify.com/episode/6KO…
Surjit Bhalla retweeted
So, are you a manager or a leader? Self-assess.
5dariyanews.com/amp/505406-C…
Surjit Bhalla retweeted
@surjitbhalla has been exposing this bias from Pikittey's first paper. Based on my research(1990s), modeling India's Income distribution using income tax data, I also disagreed with Piketty's assumptions, while using India's income tax data!
I've been pointing out since the early 2010s that Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman have a bad habit of biasing their data construction to fit their politics.
Whenever they make a suspect call in how to handle stats, it ends up showing that inequality is on the rise. They almost never go in the other direction. The errors are non-random and almost invariably reinforce their political claims about rising income and wealth concentration since 1980.
Piketty did this throughout his book Capital in the 21st Century.
Piketty and Saez did this throughout their famous 2003 paper on inequality in the US.
Piketty, Saez, and Zucman Saez and Zucman did this in their Distributional National Accounts paper that Auten and Splinter dissected.
Saez and Zucman did this in their 2019 book on tax incidence and inequality.
Saez and Zucman did this in their flurry of "studies" and white papers to support Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax proposal, California Prop 40, a new wealth tax in France, and dozens of other similar examples.
A new AI report (linked below) audited 138 papers by Saez and Zucman. It found thousands of errors, 194 of which were serious. A whopping 97% of the serious errors went in the same direction: they showed inequality rising faster or made it higher.
But there's a bigger scandal at play here. Despite these clear biases, Piketty, Saez, and Zucman have enjoyed a stream of praise and prestige within the economics profession. They get expedited and friendly reviews in top econ journals even though a more serious peer review should have caught many of these errors (the Quarterly Journal of Economics is a recurring offender in this regard). Journals regularly give them a pass after the errors in their old work come to light - they're never expected to correct any of it, and just keep on using it as if nothing changed. Their non-peer reviewed data claims are also treated as gospel by major media outlets such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. And they get showered with prizes - Saez and Zucman are both Clark Medal winners from the AEA, and Zucman got his prize in 2023 after evidence of major data shenanigans in his work came to light in 2019.
Until now, those of us who have been trying to correct the record have had to wade through the PSZ trio's cluttered, disorganized, and often non-transparent replication packages (almost all of which are convoluted piles of Excel spreadsheets) to find the problems. I did a line-by-line replication of Piketty and Saez's entire 2003 US income inequality series to use one example, and found it was riddled with errors - almost every single one of which biased their results in favor of their political story.
We had the means to catch this stuff as it was happening, but the economics profession failed to do its job. And it failed precisely because its elite ranks wanted to believe the Piketty-Saez-Zucman story for political reasons.
In close and divided elections, like the present Israeli elections, the "Lying Index" can be decisive - think about who will have lied to the exit pollsters? My guess is that Nethanyu will lose ; we will wait and see
be careful and I hope @atpu_in answer this - you say 2-3 days but a week ago I ordered and nothing has been delivered; what is going on? an internet scam?
What is the debate about, Alfie? Drèze himself now concedes, in The Economic Times (October 21), that the old rolls left out "up to 10% perhaps" of adults, and that the "majority" of deletions are legitimate.
Vote Chori – or Never Registered!
indianexpress.com/article/op…
The leading "liberals" in India today are the CJP-Congress; have either of them said anything?
1/5 Sharjeel Imam has given an interview detailing his Islamist manifesto. Surprisingly, no storm has been kicked up over pronouncements that are so unapologetically anti-liberal, anti-secular, anti-democracy, anti-Constitution—in a word, anti-national.
2/5 He openly calls the Constitution fascist, labels secularism a trap, and denounces democracy as a contrivance to deny Muslims their political rights.
3/5 The piece is a litany of indictments against the liberal class. Imam rejects any difference between liberals and Hindutvadis. In his essentialist worldview, all Hindus are the same, unanimous in denying Muslims political power they claim as a divine right.
4/5 Inadvertently, Sharjeel has recognised something that liberals have been fighting shy of acknowledging: that Hindutva’s idea of India is anchored in the same “overarching nationalist framework”— that Muslims are Indians above all else.
5/5 For more, read this Opinion article by Ibn Khaldun Bharati, who looks at Islam from an Indian perspective:
Sharjeel Imam’s Islamist manifesto will be forgotten. The silence of liberals will not
theprint.in/opinion/sharjeel…
Fully agree - why it happens worth exploring
Have you noticed the not-so-subtle difference?
This is a Reuters image of protests in France. Most of the western media reportage on French protests focus exclusively and overwhelmingly on brutality, destruction and anarchy of the protestors, portraying them as out of control monsters.
In contrast, most of the visual reportage of protests in India focus exclusively on police action on violent protestors. Rarely would you find images of destruction, though these were widely noted.
This isn't a coincidence. The lens is revealing. The visual imagery creates two narratives. One, protests in West are "evil". Protests in India are "against evil".
we all need to collectively and dispassionately think about the lessons from France - Politicians, scholars, academics please note - and Explain
France has FREE health care, paid parental leave, paid family leave, FREE child care, FREE preschool, 5 weeks paid vacation, a 35 hour work week, generous unemployment and housing benefits, and heavily subsidized higher education.
Everything the left says they want AND THEY'RE STILL PROTESTING AND BURNING SHIT DOWN.
This was written in anger, shame, and pain. All Punjabis feel it. Worthwhile doing a study of the two Punjabs - no winner.
In tribuneindia.com/news/commen…
Surjit Bhalla retweeted
Astonishing post.
Wants India to congratulate someone who has a long record of targeting India.
Navi Pillay has regularly criticised India on human rights during her tenure as the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (2008–2014)
She has attacked India on Kashmir and mass graves and disappearances, on AFSPA, on Sexual Violence and New Delhi gang rape(2012), calling for substantial legal and systemic reforms to tackle widespread sexual violence, and Caste and Gender Discrimination (2014)
Throughout her tenure, she has has had policy frictions with India on human rights issues.
India has officially responded to her attacks.
She has also been a judge of the ICC which India does not recognise..
What is the case for congratulating her?
Simply because she is of Indian origin?
It’s been six days since this remarkable woman of Indian origin (see her story, attached) won the #NobelPeacePrize. And the Government of India, her ancestral homeland, hasn’t so much as congratulated her?! Shame on the petty men who have made such a deplorable decision.
