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Video Editor: Vishal Kumar
Just a few days ahead of becoming a Nobel laureate, economist Abhijit Banerjee, speaking at the Brown University, said the Indian economy is in ‘bad shape’. In fact Banerjee’s newly-released book is titled Good Economics for Hard Times, where he along with co-author Esther Duflo, attempts to offer a solution for the same.
The Quint, in an interaction with Banerjee, picked his mind on how the slowdown in the economy bodes for the Indian millennial.
When asked how a young professional should deal with the looming prospect of a job loss, he said while it would be “insensitive” to say that the situation is great, it is still a better scenario for somebody who is at the beginning of her career, as compared to a “50-year old”.
Banerjee further said that a part of the problem is also the fact that people’s expectations of a “reasonable standard of living” have moved up radically.
“Growing up in the 70s... if you were young and you thought you wanted a job, you started by being extremely pessimistic. There were no jobs. People would sit around for three years, four years. It was kind of frightening. People were kind of used to the fact that they would take several years to get a job,” he said, recalling his young days in the erstwhile Calcutta.
The Nobel prize winner also refused to buy Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s recent assertion that the slowdown in automobile sector can be attributed to the fact that millennials are opting for ‘Ola and Uber’, instead of buying their own vehicles.
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