My guest this week is my friend Rajiv Sethi, economist extraordinaire at Barnard College and Columbia University and proprietor of Imperfect Information on Substack. Rajiv published a post about my forthcoming book, Self-Censorship, and racial passing. It’s characteristic of Rajiv’s creativity to pair these two seemingly unrelated phenomena—the connection had certainly not occurred to me. So I wanted to bring him on to talk about that post and other matters economic and political.
Rajiv was actually indirectly responsible for getting Self-Censorship published. The editor who commissioned the book discovered my essay “Self-Censorship in Public Discourse” while watching an old TGS episode where Rajiv and I discuss it. We talk about that and Rajiv’s Substack post before moving onto his current economic work. He’s been studying the relationship between parental investment and educational attainment, especially regarding attempts to achieve racial parity in academic outcomes. He’s also continuing his work on election prediction markets and forecasting models, which we discussed in our last conversation. From there we move on to an array of topics: Trump’s proposed tariffs, Paul Krugman’s work and his departure from the New York Times, Indian politics, and the possibility of anti-DEI overreach in the new Trump administration.
Besides being a great friend, Rajiv is an uncommonly gifted public economist. He has a way of explaining complex economic issues in a comprehensible way without dumbing things down. You can bet you’ll be hearing from him again soon here.
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1:04 Rajiv’s role in getting Glenn’s forthcoming book published
7:39 Self-censorship and racial passing
9:29 Rajiv’s work on parental investment and educational attainment
17:01 Rajiv: Prediction markets outperformed forecasting models in 2024
23:36 Are Trump’s tariff threats having their intended effects on foreign markets?
31:53 Why Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2008
35:07 Rajiv recommends some public-facing economists
39:26 Secular backsliding in India
43:51 Trump’s revocation of LBJ’s 1965 anti-discrimination executive order
Recorded January 25, 2025
Links and Readings
Rajiv’s Substack, Imperfect Information
Rajiv post Substack post, “Self-Censorship, Passing, and Natural Cover”
James Weldon Johnson’s novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
Glenn and Rajiv’s 2014 conversation about self-censorship
Glenn and Rajiv’s previous conversation
Rajiv and Dyotona Dasgupta’s working paper, “Educational Standards and Parental Investment”
Rajiv’s post, “The Tariff Threat”
Paul Krugman’s post, “The Dollar and the Trade Deficit”
John Cochrane’s review of Late Admissions
Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution
Gyan Mukherjee’s 1943 film, Kismet
Rajiv and Brendan O’Flaherty’s book, Shadows of Doubt: Stereotypes, Crime, and the Pursuit of Justice
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