#81 Aap Party Hain, Ya Broker?🎧

<em>This newsletter is really a public policy thought-letter. While excellent newsletters on specific themes within public policy already exist, this thought-letter is about frameworks, mental models, and key ideas that will hopefully help you think about any public policy problem in imaginative ways. It seeks to answer just one question: </em><strong><em>how do I think about a particular public policy problem/solution?</em></strong><br/><br/><em>Welcome to the mid-week edition in which we write essays on a public policy theme. The usual public policy review comes out on weekends.</em><br/><br/><em>PS: If you enjoy listening instead of reading, we have this edition available as an audio narration on all podcasting platforms courtesy the good folks at </em><a target="_blank" href="https://www.ad-auris.com/"><em>Ad-Auris</em></a><em>. If you have any feedback, please send it to us. </em><br/><br/><em>- RSJ</em><br/><br/><em>Aap party hain, ya broker?</em><br/><br/>That line from Dibakar Banerjee’s sleeper hit <em>Khosla Ka Ghosla</em> (2006) sums up our attitude to middlemen. Indians have an instinctive distrust of business or ‘corporate’. But that’s small <em>chhutta</em> compared to our almost visceral antipathy to broker. We use <em>dalal</em> as a pejorative in polite conversations — it is someone who gets in the way of an honest transaction between two willing parties and takes a ‘cut’. <br/><br/>From the trader at the APMC <em>mandis</em> to the life insurance agent selling you a policy that you don’t need, the middleman is the easy policy target whose elimination is seen as necessary. Nobody can <em>see</em> what they produce or the labour they put in, yet they seem to corner most of the profits. <br/><br/>India might be an extreme case but elsewhere in the world too, the intermediary isn’t the most welcome of sights. For every business that has middlemen bringing the buyers and sellers together, there are scores of entrepreneurs building platforms to make them irrelevant. The billion-dollar start-up idea to