Ep 448: Vidya Mahambare, the Rooted Economist

**Vidya Mahambare** (0:05)
It struck me a while ago that there are two pathways to expertise. They come from opposite directions and they are both essential. For lack of better terminology, I'll just call them top-down learning and bottom-up learning. Top-down is when you are instructed in terms of first principles and you use theory to become better at the practice. Bottom-up is when you learn by doing, by diving into the weeds. Let me give you an example. In the case of chess, a top-down approach would be to first learn the basic principles of chess and go deeper from there. You learn that space is important, so you must fight for the center of the board. You learn that initiative is important, so you must develop your pieces early, and so on. A bottom-up approach would be to just learn the moves, start playing, keep playing, learn by doing. Over time, as you put in volume, your pattern recognition gets better and better, and light bulbs go off in your head, and you internalize all the first principles anyway.
Now, to truly know chess, playing a lot of chess is non-negotiable. Top-down study only gets you so far. And this is true of everything in this world, including economics. The kind of economists I despise are the privileged kids who go to a foreign university, learn the cool math and the fancy jargon, learn how to game the ecosystem they are in, whether it is academia or the policy world, but don't have deep understanding of the real world because they are disconnected from it.
The kind of economist I admire is someone who is grounded, who has learned from lived experience, who is constantly curious and who came to the formal study of economics well after they dived into the informal study of economics, for what is economics but the study of human behavior.
My guest today is one such fine scholar. Pay attention to her work. Remember her name. Vidya Mahambare.

**Amit Varma** (1:57)
Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral science. Please welcome your host, Amit Varma.

**Vidya Mahambare** (2:11)
Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen. My guest today is Vidya Mahambare, an economist and author based in Chennai, who is also a prolific columnist and acclaimed teacher of economics and now a podcaster herself. I have admired Vidya's work for a long time now, discussing it in past episodes with the likes of Alice Evans and Sowmya Dhanaraj, who has also been Vidya's co-author for a few of those papers. Vidya is not one of those economists who is happy to be in an economic silo doing economic things. She is a keen thinker on society, takes a common sense approach to whatever she studies and has deep thoughts on pedagogy. I learnt a lot about India, Indian Women, the field of economics, education, health care and indeed I learnt a lot about learning while recording this episode with Vidya. I am sure you will enjoy it as well. But before we get to it, let's take a quick commercial break.
Do you want to read more? I have put in a lot of work in recent years in building a reading habit. This means that I read more books but I also read more long-form articles and essays. There is a world of knowledge available through the Internet. But the problem we all face is, how do we navigate this knowledge? How do we know what to read? How do we put the right incentives in place?
Well, I discovered one way. A couple of friends of mine run this awesome company called CTQ Compounds at ctqcompounds.com which aims to help people up-level themselves by reading more. A few months ago, I signed up for one of their programs called The Daily Reader. Every day for six months, they sent me a long-form article to read. The subjects covered went from machine learning to mythology to mental models and marmalade. This helped me build a habit of reading. At the end of every day, I understood the world a little better than I did before. So if you want to build your reading habit, head on over to CTQ Compounds and check out their Daily Reader. New batches start every month. They also have a great program called Future Stack, which helps you stay up-to-date with ideas, skills, and mental models that will help you stay relevant in the future. Future Stack batches start every Saturday. What's more, you get a discount of a whopping Rs.
2500 if you use the discount code Unseen. So head on over to CTQ Compounds at ctqcompounds.com and use the code Unseen.
Uplevel yourself.
Vidya, welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.