The nature of this variant, combined with widespread vaccine use, may make it seem less severe in some ways than earlier ones. It doesn’t always feel that like that here.
Economist Kaushik Basu’s journals offer a fascinating inside view of a policy advisor’s life
An excerpt from ‘Policymaker’s Journal: From New Delhi to Washington DC’, by Kaushik Basu.
8 August 2012, Wednesday
Some two weeks before 31st July, my last day as CEA, I got a call from the World Bank president’s office. A man with a slight Indian accent, one of his assistants, a Sikh gentleman I later gathered, said that the president wanted to talk to me about various things. So much so that he wondered if I could do a brief trip to Washington.
I thought that since Jim Yong Kim had taken over as World Bank president recently (in June) and was quite a greenhorn in this kind of work, he must be calling up chief economists or treasury chiefs of various countries to get a briefing on their economies. That was a noble enough mission but it was too much to expect me to fly all the way to Washington to brief him. So I said I was happy to talk but that we could just as well have