Who is Ajay Shah?
Ajay Shah is an economist and co-founder of the XKDR Forum. He has worked in academia, in policy research and at the Ministry of Finance. He trained as an aeronautical engineer at IIT Bombay before moving into economics, and co-hosted the podcast Everything is Everything with Amit Varma.
This episode was also the first for Shrreya Loomba and Aly Muhammad Dadwani as co-hosts, the first conversation of Decoded's Associate Host Programme.
An inherited question
Ajay begins with his father, who died when Ajay was 18, and the questions about what is worth doing that he says he inherited from him. Economics, he explains, felt like the right balance between the rigour of physics and the practical problem-solving of engineering. Manmohan Singh's 1991 budget, which opened India's economy, pulled him back to India.
Building teams that think well
He talks about building research teams with Susan Thomas, and what famous institutions such as Bell Labs, RAND and the Cavendish Laboratory suggest about how culture and incentives shape good research. At XKDR, choosing the right problems matters as much as solving them. He names three questions he thinks matter most today: defending economic growth, climate change, and populism.
AI and learning
A large part of the conversation is about AI. Ajay argues that homework and projects no longer work as they used to, and that outsourcing your thinking to an LLM costs you your own growth. He recommends AI as a tutor and as a critic instead. Drawing on the mathematician Terence Tao, he also argues that a proof nobody understands is not the same as mathematical knowledge.
Think about it
Five questions with no tidy answers.
- How would you answer the question 'what is worth doing?' for your own next five years?
- Why might an engineer make a good economist? What might they miss?
- What makes a team of researchers, or a class, think well together?
- Do you agree that growth, climate change and populism are the most important questions today? What would you add?
- Is removing barriers the right single reform? What would you choose instead?