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Dear readers, Capitalism lives in mystery behind smokescreens created by economists of the orthodoxy who have worked to build an entire mythology which protects and sustains the system. It is the task of heterodox analysis to demystify and demythologize capitalism. Chimera’s Bane is a vehicle for my written work. It is my hope and intention
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Subject: Alumni concern re university restructuring To: Board Chair Linda Rappaport, President Joel Towers, Provost Richard Kessler Dear Linda, Joel, and Richard, I hope you are all well. I am writing this public letter to you in my capacity as alumnus of both the New School for Social Research (NSSR) and the board of trustees
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Art: The Angel of Death I, by Evelyn de Morgan
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Artificial intelligence (AI) is many things: a fear, an ambition, a fantasy, a site of conflict, a financial bubble, and an ideological battleground. But right now I can’t help but feel that it is a very important unfolding story about humanity. Of course there are many storytellers with as many stories to tell about AI.
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The heterodoxy has been putting up a worthy fight in the latest Twitter battle against economic orthodoxy. It feels like there are more of us now than there were before. The war, while still lopsided, has been tipped into our favor by global circumstances which have made the orthodoxy look foolish; perhaps not as foolish
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* This review contains spoilers. I didn’t watch the first season of Dune: Prophecy (2024) when it was released last year. I assumed that it was a cash grab following the success of the two Dune movies, which I enjoyed watching very much, and hence didn’t give it the time of day. By the time
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For some time now I have been carrying with me the dread of finding out one day about the death of one of my teachers. When I was about to head to class day before yesterday, I paused to have a look at the bookshelf in my office to see if I wanted to take
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I wanted to try to make a short film, just to see what I could come up with when experimenting with the medium and the basics I have access to: a camera phone, some music, and an editing app. There was no script. I walked around shooting some footage of things I found interesting and
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This blogpost contains spoilers. “Life, and Nothing More” (زندگی، و دیگر ھیـچ), the 1992 film by Iranian director and writer Abbas Kiarostami, is a powerful introduction to the filmmaker’s work. A film so simple and direct in its framing and communication, so without pretence and filter, it is almost disturbing and jarring. The sparsity of
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I’m writing this primarily as a way of achieving clarity for myself. The publishing part of it is for people who might be curious as to why I’m leaving the University at the end of this fall semester. It was a long time coming. I have been thinking about it for a few years now.
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The Heterodox Economics Working Group (HEWG) is an effort to slowly help develop a Pakistani community of economic heterodoxy, something I feel is sorely needed: So let this be a call to action and invitation for conversation and cooperation to all fellow proponents of economic heterodoxy. We are scattered on the intellectual battlefield, isolated and
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June 18, 2025: I wrote this (very) short story, almost a parable – though I’m not sure a parable for what – for my wife when we were in Istanbul in the spring of 2024. There were once two lovers who lived in a pristine land which they ruled. The king and queen walked through
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All that is good in my work has come to me from my teachers and is dedicated to the memory of my late brother. All that is flawed belongs to me. Upon publishing my last post on the death of the corporate university, I realized that it was a much more polished sequel to the
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The slippery slope on which the board of Columbia University has stumbled since the start of the Gaza protests has turned out to be very steep, and the crash has been nothing less than spectacular. It also tells us something about the universities at large: the fall of the corporate governance of universities is final
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Click here to read my book review of Moschella and Monnet’s 2024 books on central banks. Published in Review of Political Economy.
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Click here to read my book review of Leon Wansleben’s The Rise of Central Banks in the Review of Radical Political Economics.
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To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society. For the alleged commodity ‘‘labor power’’ cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting also
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Blogpost for the MHRC blog, co-authored with my colleagues Eeman Qureshi and Rimsha Arif. An excerpt: “As discussions and developmental work on central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) pick up pace across the world, watchers of Pakistan’s economic evolution are interested in whether we might see a CBDC issued by the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP).
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Dear Dr. Shamshad Akhtar, I am writing this open letter to call on you to resign from the post of minister of finance and publicly acknowledge the oppressive and illegitimate character of the present Government of Pakistan. The actions of the police in Islamabad, terrorizing peaceful protestors asking for accountability and justice for the abduction
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I spend a lot of my time thinking and learning about economics, so my mind soon turns to other things. And I increasingly want to write and post things which have almost nothing to do with economics. I’ll now be posting those things mostly on this new blog: Visions of the Khan.
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There are some lessons about economics I find myself repeating to both my students and also to myself. So I’ve decided to share five of those lessons in this blogpost. These are five lessons I want economics students to know, all the way from the first undergraduate year through to the senior year, and perhaps
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Feels good to have taken a step back from active engagement on social media. It’s like a weight has been lifted. I am liberated from the burden of being compelled to say something about everything. People have stopped engaging with my tweets. It is beautiful. And so my focus on the really important work –
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The State Bank of Pakistan’s (SBP) monetary policy committee (MPC) statement of April 4, 2023 contained a statement which may sound curious to a student of economics: “Broad money growth showed a slight uptick in February, primarily due to a significant expansion in net domestic assets of the banking system. This was largely on account
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I am consciously taking a break from Twitter and short form writing and publishing (op-eds and blogs). The Twitter app on my phone is deleted, and besides a short blog which is expected to be out soon and will be posted here to my website blog, there is no more short form writing on the
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Read my opinion piece for PIDE’s Discourse magazine here.
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This article was published in The Friday Times. You can also read it here on the TFT website. The events of the last few days have brought many images to our screens which showed the quickly crumbling state-society relationship: a soldier’s statue bent over at the knees, the gate of the military GHQ being shaken
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It has been over two months since the news of Anum’s passing, news which shook the ground beneath my feet. Even though she was one of my closest friends, there was grief but no grieving, sorrow but no mourning. There was no time. I had thrown myself into the service of my two week old
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New post for the Monetary Policy Institute which you can read here. An excerpt: “The SBP’s failure to check inflation is completely expected, not because they have been behind the curve, as Uzair Younus argues, but instead because interest rates are not the relevant policy tool for managing the present inflationary pressures. The Pakistani debate on
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This article was first published in the Friday Times. A few months ago, I wrote an article trying to put praise for Miftah Ismail into perspective and context. The same crisis theater in which Miftah was christened Maximus now has a new figure at the center of a new act of the play, an act
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This article was first published in The Friday Times. There is something pointless – though not entirely pointless, as I hope to argue here – about an economic charter. As commentators like Mosharraf Zaidi and Uzair Younus have rightly pointed out, Pakistan’s constitution and parliament are already there as binding constraints to bring warring political
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The State Bank of Pakistan (Amendment) Act, 2022 (Act No. VI of 2022) is a good case study to illustrate how the intersection of law, politics and institutions is of interest for anyone concerned about the governance of Pakistan. It illustrates how through legislation passed by elected political representatives of the people of Pakistan, the
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Here’s an excerpt from my new blogpost for the Monetary Policy Institute, which you can read here: The man-made political culture and institutional architecture of policy in Pakistan are fraught with difficulties. In this blogpost, I try to shed light on some of these difficulties. Earlier this year, the State Bank of Pakistan Act 1956
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Here’s an excerpt from today’s op-ed in The News: “Since the contest is taking place without ground rules, we should not be surprised or caught off guard if it brings the country to its knees. We are stuck in a crisis equilibrium since at least the start of the calendar year, if not longer. People
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At some point in the summer this year, I stumbled upon Gene Park’s article on Hideo Kojima, creator of Metal Gear Solid. It brought his game Death Stranding to my attention, which I started playing soon after. What I thought would be another cool and entertaining game turned out to be something else entirely: an
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Here’s an excerpt from my op-ed in The News on Miftah Ismail’s moment: “The admiration and praise should be tempered with the knowledge that he was without question an unelected minister of finance with no public mandate other than belonging to the PML-N – which doesn’t say much. His party is only one part of
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This year on World Mental Health Day (October 10), I was a day late tweeting that I’m renewing my commitment to my mental health, as I did last year. And I thought that I wanted to say a little bit more than just a few tweets. So I said that I was going to do
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Read my op-ed for The News here.
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Read my op-ed in The News here.
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Read my op-ed for The News here.
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Read my op-ed for The News here.
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Read here on the Monetary Policy Institute blog.
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The Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), an Islamabad based think-tank, has “suggested forming an economic council under NSC comprising the government, leaders of the opposition in the Parliament (National Assembly and Senate), all four chief ministers and the representatives from top military brass.” This may sound like a harmless proposal. After all, what Pakistani could
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Politics in Pakistan has achieved something truly special. While economics and its practitioners have been taking a continuous beating the world over since the the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-08, Pakistani politics and its most prominent public faces have dragged themselves through so much mud that nobody wants anything to do with them. Politics is
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Conflicting claims: the relationship between political instability and the economy Many people are worried about how political instability is creating an inconducive environment for the Pakistani economy. Khaleeq Kiani writes in Dawn that “The prime minister has not been able to hold a meeting of the federal cabinet for almost a month against the normal
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Mearsheimer and the character of Pakistan’s political economy Political scientist John Mearsheimer has been getting a lot of attention following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. While his realist view (in the social scientific sense rather than the literal sense) has been picked apart by Smolenski and Dutkiewicz, it is understandable why it might be popular
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I had written the following letter to the Financial Times in the summer of 2018 prior to the general elections in Pakistan. The FT didn’t publish it. I’m posting it here now. I think I got at least some things right. Some of my observations are still relevant today in light of recent developments, such
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In his February 28, 2022 speech, Prime Minister Imran Khan presented a curious table with inflation data which got me thinking. While the table looked crude and poorly put together, there might in fact have been some method to the seemingly haphazard way the information was presented. The key, I think, is to remember that
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Between a capitalist rock and a democratic hard place Capitalism and democracy, for all their beauty, are also brutal systems, subject to the volatility and absurdities of human decision making. Guided by the profit motive and the exclusionary power of capital, capitalism is a powerful but difficult beast to tame and put to work for
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This is the first entry in a series of experimental posts which could evolve into a brief newsletter. These posts, and perhaps the newsletter, will be called ‘Notes in Circulation’ – i.e. my notes on what I’m seeing, hearing, reading and on whatever is in circulation. It is also a reference to the circulation of
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I had penned the following on Saturday, January 22, 2022. The day after, the prime minister began a surreal broadcast by complaining about not being able to speak in parliament. The recently published National Security Policy of Pakistan (along with its summary) pretends to be technical and apolitical in claiming to put economic resources and their re-distribution at
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Capitalism is on trial — again. Critics of capitalism have at least in part been vindicated. Governments have their work cut out for them at this time of crisis. How governments and policy makers frame their work will be of crucial importance. They will now have to make the case for capitalism even as the
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Read here at the Developing Economics blog.
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Letter in FT: read here.
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Letter in FT: read here.
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I recently read this article in the Financial Times on central bankers, and wrote this letter to the editor as a response.
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Daniyal Khan 