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What is AI? That is a relatively easy question to answer: AI is a general-purpose technology. That's one way to understand the GPT in ChatGPT!

It is a kind of technology that reorganizes work, firms, and sometimes even national bargains. This — the idea of a GPT — isn't new. Electricity and the internet were earlier examples of GPTs. The thing to understand about AI is that its frontier moves faster than any GPT before it.

That is one reason why the big-picture questions about AI — who gains, who pays, and, specifically as an Indian, what should India do about the difference? — become very important.

This page, the one that you're on right now, is where my reading on these questions hopefully becomes a coherent spine. The arguments in full live in essays on the blog. What lives here is the synthesis: a living field guide on this topic, which will grow as I read, and will also carry links to the essays I write on my blog on related topics.

I'll also keep on this page the occasional piece on anything else worth explaining in plain, simple and, most importantly, usable economics. There's one below the fold, for example, on an excellent piece that Neelkanth Mishra wrote recently. I'll hopefully add more as I go along!

But really, the one topic that I read as an economist these days is AI. I don't think it is possible to overstate AI's importance, and this page is an attempt to show why I think so — and how my thinking on the topic evolves as does the field itself.

Front and center

The Economics of AI — a living field guide

Who gains from AI, who pays for it, and what India should do about the difference. Ten claims, a six-part map, a growing reading library, and a live exhibit of the falling price of intelligence — grown out of two talks delivered at the Takshashila Institution, preserved inside exactly as given. Most of what I read lands here, one way or another.

Occasional pieces

ad hoc, whenever plain economics can help

Macro · Interactive explainer

India's Development Equation

What would it actually take for India to be called developed by 2047? The arithmetic behind the 9% headline: a crossing-year calculator, the demographic clock, a production engine, and the moving high-income line — built around Neelkanth Mishra's essay.

More occasionals will land here as the mood takes; the field guide above is where the steady accumulation happens.