Arjun Ramani

About Arjun Ramani

Arjun Ramani was born in West Lafayette, Indiana to immigrants from Tamil Nadu, India. Growing up, Arjun’s father, an engineering professor, instilled in him a love of technology and imagining possible new futures. His mother, executive director of a children’s science museum, took him on trips across the world and encouraged him to journal about his observations.

These dual interests in technology and the world led Arjun to Stanford University, where he studied economics as an undergraduate and pursued a master’s in computer science specializing in artificial intelligence. As a high school and college debater, Arjun cared deeply about free and informed public discourse. He started the Stanford Open Data Project to improve campus data transparency as data editor of the school’s newspaper. In college, Arjun also spent time at the White House working on economic policy, in Ghana helping startups scale, and at Citadel in financial markets—all of which cultivated a broad interest in the economic world. His undergraduate thesis on the impact of remote work on cities won the Kennedy Prize for best undergraduate thesis in the social sciences. An updated version of this project was published in PNAS.

After graduation, Arjun became The Economist’s global business and economics correspondent. He first covered technology and finance, and later shifted to covering AI after the technology took the world by storm in 2022. In 2023 Arjun moved to India to cover the Indian economy in the lead up to its election, history’s largest democratic event. There he gained a much deeper appreciation for the social and institutional barriers that slowed technology adoption and catch-up growth. Arjun wrote or co-wrote six cover stories, was shortlisted for UK financial journalist of the year in 2024 for his AI and economics reporting, and co-authored a six-part special report on India’s economy.

Arjun is now pursuing a PhD in economics at MIT where he studies technological change and innovation. He hopes his research can inform policies and business practices that generate broadly-shared economic growth.