How to Get Into Public Policy & Development Economics (Harvard Economist POV) - w/ Jishnu

What do you think the richest 5% of urban India earns in a month?I guessed ten lakh. The real number is twenty thousand rupees — about $200. And that was the least surprising thing Professor Jishnu Das said to me.This one rewired how I see my own country.We started with a health insurance plan called RSBY, built to cover millions of poor families. Then Jishnu told me how one misfiled word — someone typed "Sally" where a name should have gone — quietly erased about a third of the people the plan was supposed to protect.(Sit with that. A typo, not a budget cut, deciding who gets care.)Here's the thread that runs through the whole conversation: every problem we call "technical" is actually a human one. The data doesn't break on its own. People fill it in, skip a field, round a number, guess. The architecture only works if you understand the hands touching it.We got into what the numbers really say about income inequality in India — who sits in the top 5%, who's in the bottom, and where your own school lands once you stop guessing and look. If you think you know where you fall, you probably don't. I didn't.Then Jishnu made a case I keep chewing on: dumbing ideas down is quietly killing good ones. When you strip a fact to make it "simple," you often strip out the part that made it true. The fix isn't more jargon. It's getting basic, boring, accurate facts to the exact people they're about.We also talked careers — real ones. What a public policy career looks like from the inside. Whether policy is a good career or just a nice thing to say at dinner. How research actually reaches the world instead of dying in a PDF nobody opens. If you're weighing development economics, World Bank careers, civic tech, or any job where the work has to matter, this is a candid look at the stress and the payoff.There's also a detour into functional illiteracy in the US and how India stacks up against the West — the kind of comparison that sounds settled until someone shows you the data.If you care about how India's economy actually works, or you want careers that count for something, give this a listen.More episodes: readysetdopodcast.comGuest: Professor Jishnu DasChapters:00:00 — Introduction to RSBY and Its Impact05:53 — The Role of Data in Policy Making08:36 — Understanding Human Behavior in Data Flow11:47 — Challenges in Policy Implementation14:40 — The Stress of Policy Work17:40 — Cultural Context in Policy Research20:48 — The Importance of Interesting vs. Important23:50 — The Need for Basic Descriptive Facts26:54 — Engaging the Next Generation of Policy Workers31:25 — The Importance of Research Translation34:42 — The Role of Impact in Academia37:41 — Democratizing Research and Policy40:30 — Understanding Economic Disparities49:30 — Current Projects and Future Directions