Leo Mirani

speaker

175 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 3 Aug

Leo Mirani’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Economist Podcasts · Strait and narrowing: the Iran deal crumbles · 15 Jul 2026 podcast

not necessarily the best of your abilities, but the least of your inabilities, let us say.

And so if you're a bureaucrat and you do a terrific job, but that involves taking risks, you're not going to get any reward for that.

But you check all the right boxes and you do a terrible job, you're not going to get in trouble for that.

For example, recently, there was a big scandal in India because there was this very important school leaving exam whose online processes were less than ideal and not super secure.

And some 19-year-old figured out how to hack them.

And the guy who was in charge of that, what happened to him?

He was transferred to the agriculture ministry.

There are, in fact, several examples.

I cannot tell you how easy it is to pay for stuff in India.

That's one example.

It's called UPI and it has changed my life.

But the canonical example, the foundational example is something called Aadhaar, which is a national biometric ID system.

And you're right, I am too down in India.

I should acknowledge there's some great stuff, right?

So Aadhaar, the biometric ID, that was done within government.

But the way it was done was they got a guy who knew stuff.

But the guy that they got who knew stuff, they also gave him on his demand the rank of cabinet minister.

So now you have a guy who has both technical competence as well as authority.

And this combination is important, right?

And he worked within all of the systems that already exist within the Indian government, within the Indian bureaucracy, within systems.

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