Politics: The best 'asset class'

If you were the kind who was born in a small town in eastern India, as I was, you would have always been told that studying science (which could also mean getting a degree in engineering or becoming a medical doctor) was much better than studying arts. If you wanted to build a career in anything, you had to study science. Those who could not get admission into a science course studied arts and commerce. At least that is what the traditional wisdom, which was all wrong, used to be. Nevertheless, as you live and learn, you realise that the arts subjects are equally, if not more, important than studying just science. As I have read more and more, this has occurred to me over and over again over the last two decades. And it happened yet again over the course of the last ten days as I read through Milan Vaishnav's When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics. This is the first time I have read a book which comes closest to political science. And what I loved about the book was its data-driven approach (something conventional wisdom expects only with science). It also led to the realisation that non-economics subjects can also be extremely data-driven, which is a rather obvious point many of us don't realise because of our conditioning. One of the important points that Vaishnav makes in the book is that politics is an extremely lucrative proposition. As he wr

This article was originally published on April 15, 2017.