Discourse on Demonetisation

Dr. Indradeep Ghosh from the MDAE (Meghnad Desai Academy of Economics) gave a speech in the college on the 14^th of December, which was informative and insightful at the same time; the talk was particularly enjoyable as it involved a lot of audience participation.

The seminar started with an introduction of the speaker by Palak Jain, FYBA, who gave a brief account of dr. Ghosh’s educational details as well as his work experience. Dr. Ghosh is an expert in macroeconomics and international economics, who has spent all his professional life in the USA. He has published several papers in peer-reviewed journals such as the Global Economy Journal.

Dr. Ghosh began the address introducing himself and his experiences. He went on to describe the Indian economy the way he saw it, and then proposed to conduct an experiment, sending the audience into a fit of hushed chatter. He chose 4 groups of 4 people each, and told them that they could choose to either have a high or a low level of investment. The benefits reaped by their decision, however, would depend on others’ decisions:

Ex: if  you chose 'L' and out of the other 3 in your group, two chose H, your reward would be 4.

3 rounds were conducted, meaning there were 12 variations or ‘mini-economies’ in toto:

The second half of the address included a lot of specific economic benefits of demonetization for the nation overwhelming the listeners with the positive side of economic reforms. He was successful in weaving his argument in an elliptical manner that trust in case of monetary interests is rather important in an economy.

As one might observe, the best performing economies were the ones that had high levels of investment. Yet most people (especially in the beginning) chose a lower level of investment. The question remained: why? Professor Ghosh explained : it was because the variance in the rewards begotten by choosing H was much greater than those received by choosing L. Economies across the world are plagued with low levels of investment as industries, suspicious of one another, invest very little and prefer to receive modest profits rather than take a risk by trusting others in the economy. 

The audience was left in stunned silence as Dr. Ghosh mixed Psychology and Economics to give a fresh new argument in favour of the reforms undertaken by the incumbent government. He managed to spark curious questions from the HOD Dr. Salvi as well as Utpat ma’am from the faculty. A few students also asked questions, but most were left agape at the brilliant way he executed his speech.

The seminar ended with vote of thanks given by Nikita Panicker on behalf of the students.

Altogether it was an intriguing seminar where in spite of debating a controversial topic of demonetization in terms of economic gains, the students and teachers were left marvelling at a novel perspective on a much-discussed topic.

-Nikhila Gadge and Vishal Upadhayay