Prof. Sriya Iyer

Prof. Sriya Iyer (Ph.D., University of Cambridge) is the Janeway Fellow in Economics at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of The Economics of Religion in India (Harvard University Press, 2018) and Demography and Religion in India (Oxford University Press, 2002).



You have written a lot about economics and religion. Were you interested in religion or in economics first, and what brought these two into contact?

I was interested in economics first as it is a great subject that teaches us a lot about concepts such as incentives, trade-offs, how people make decisions, and so forth. Coming from India, I was very aware of inequality around me - not just economic, but also social and institutional inequality. This got me interested more generally in how economics could be used to understand social problems. My interest in religion as a scholarly subject came later when I was doing my doctoral studies. I was curious to see if methods from economics such as economic theory and statistics could also be used to understand religion in different parts of the world, to complement studies which were done in other disciplines, and if economics as a subject could contribute more to inter-disciplinary dialogues about religion.

What are the differences—if any—between how economics is taught in India and in other countries?

Economics as a subject is taught very similarly in India as it is in the UK or the US. The core principles of the subject - microeconomics, macroeconomics, statistics - are taught similarly, and many students are fortunate to have great teachers who first introduce them to the subject. But where you live also has an effect on how you might apply economics to study the real world. And if you do come from a developing country, you may be interested to see how these fundamental economic principles can be used to help real people in the real world with their problems - be it poverty, inequality, access to basic goods like food, shelter, education, healthcare and so forth. Sometimes what you observe growing up around you can motivate your interest in a particular economics subject many years down the line.

Prof. Alvin Roth

Alvin Roth won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2012 and is best known for his work on kidney exchange markets. He is the Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics at Stanford University and the Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration Emeritus at Harvard University.


In The Graduate, a character says to Dustin Hoffman as he is about to finish school and head out into the world, “I want to say one word to you, just one word,” and that one word is “Plastics,” because, he says, “there’s a great future in plastics.” If you were to say “just one word” to a young person thinking about being an economist, what would that word be?

“Computerized-markets.”

[For Roth’s own work on computerized markets, see here, here, here, and here.

For other advice he gives to young economists, here’s a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9SLiRpUNsc

The famous scene from The Graduate can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dug-G9xVdVs ]