Meghnad Desai, Baron Desai
Meghnad Jagdishchandra Desai, Baron Desai (born 10 July 1940) is an Indian-born naturalised British economist and former Labour politician. He stood unsuccessfully for the position of Lord Speaker in the House of Lords in 2011. He has been awarded the Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian award in the Republic of India, in 2008. He is a Professor Emeritus of the London School of Economics. Early life Born in Vadodara, Gujarat, India, Desai grew up with two brothers and one sister. He is said to have gone to secondary school at age seven and matriculated at 14. He secured a bachelor's degree in economics from Ramnarain Ruia College, affiliated to the University of Mumbai, and then pursued a master's degree in economics from the Department of Economics (now called the Mumbai School of Economics and Public Policy) of University of Mumbai, after which he won a scholarship to University of Pennsylvania in August 1960. He completed his PhD in economics at Pennsylvania in 1963. Political career Desai has been active in the British Labour Party, becoming chairman between 1986 and 1992, and was made Honorary Lifetime and President of Islington South and Finsbury Constituency Labour Party in London. He was created a life peer as Baron Desai, of St Clement Danes in the City of Westminster, on 5 June 1991. He was a member of Labour Friends of Israel. Desai quit his Labour Party membership of 49 years over antisemitism concerns in November 2020, following the readmission of former Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn as a member. Academic career Early in his career, Desai worked as an Associate Specialist in the Department of Agricultural Economics, University of California, Berkeley, California. He became a lecturer at the London School of Economics in 1965 and professor of economics in 1983. At the LSE, he taught econometrics, macroeconomics, Marxian economics and development economics over the years. In the 1970s, he taught an idiosyncratic version of economic principles to freshers at the LSE (starting with Piero Sraffa). From 1990 to 1995, he headed LSE’s Development Studies Institute and lead LSE Global Governance from 1992 to 2003, the year of his retirement. Desai wrote his first book Marxian Economic Theory in 1973 followed by Applied Econometrics in 1976 and Marxian Economics, a revised edition of his 1973 book in 1979. He wrote Testing Monetarism, a critique of monetarism, in 1981. Desai has written extensively publishing over 200 articles in academic journals and had a regular column in the British radical weekly Tribune during 1985–1994, in the Indian business daily Business Standard (1995–2001) and in Indian Express and Financial Express. From 1984 to 1991, he was co-editor of the Journal of Applied Econometrics. A selection of his academic papers was published in two volumes as The Selected Essays of Meghnad Desai in 1995. In 2002, Desai's book Marx's Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism stated that globalisation would tend toward the revival of socialism. Desai analyses some of Marx's lesser known writings