Richard H Thaler, the American economist who was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize for Economics on Monday, had applauded Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision to demonetise Indian currency last year.
On 8 November 2016, when PM Modi declared his government’s decision to take on black money by eliminating Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes, Thaler had taken to Twitter to say he thought it was a smart decision.
That sounds well and good (yay for PM Modi), but this isn’t where the conversation ends.
When an apparently perplexed user responded to Thaler’s tweet, informing him that Modi had introduced Rs 2,000 notes instead, Thaler simply said, “really? Damn,” indicating that he probably didn’t think it was the best idea.
But why has this Twitter thread from a year ago resurfaced now?
Well, we owe this courtesy to Amit Malviya, a man “in-charge of BJP’s national Information & Technology” – in other words, the head of the BJP IT cell. Malviya took to Twitter to share this interesting nugget of information – that the man who just won the Nobel Prize for Economics had expressed his approval of demonetisation.
But, as is evident, Malviya neglected to share the full picture (quite literally).
Despite being called out for sharing this misinformation, the tweet has still not been deleted from Malviya’s Twitter timeline. It has been retweeted by many, including key party members like Minister of Railways, Piyush Goyal and party karyakarta Giriraj Singh.
On being informed of this, Goyal reversed his retweet, but the tweet still hasn’t budged from Malviya’s timeline.
Not just retweets, Malviya’s ‘disocvery’ has also been converted into a poster (just in case someone misses the point).
It’s not clear what Thaler’s stance has been on demonetisation since. But it would do us well to not take things at face value (Read: Over 1.1K retweets on Malviya’s tweet the last time we checked.)
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