Leo Mirani

speaker

157 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 15 Jul

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

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

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

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Intelligence from The Economist · Strait and narrowing: the Iran deal crumbles · 15 Jul 2026 podcast

But the real problem here is not web design, it's institutional design, right?

It's the incentives baked into the bureaucracy and all of this.

And the problem with bureaucracy, not just in India, but anywhere in the world, is that it runs on risk aversion.

You want to do your job to not necessarily the best of your abilities, but the least of your inabilities, let us say.

And so if you're a bureaucracy

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 nineteen 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 Aadhar, 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 Aadhar, 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.

Showing 61–80 of 157 · page 4 of 8