Meghnad Jagdishchandra Desai, Baron Desai was born on 10 July 1940, and is a British economist and former Labour politician.
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29 Facts About Baron Desai
2.
Baron Desai stood unsuccessfully for the position of Lord Speaker in the House of Lords in 2011.
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3.
Baron Desai has been awarded the Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian award in the Republic of India, in 2008.
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5.
Baron Desai is said to have gone to secondary school at age seven and matriculated at 14.
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6.
Baron Desai 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 of University of Mumbai, after which he won a scholarship to University of Pennsylvania in August 1960.
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8.
Baron 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.
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9.
Baron Desai was created a life peer as Baron Desai, of St Clement Danes in the City of Westminster, on 5 June 1991.
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11.
Baron 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.
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12.
Currently, Baron Desai is chairman of the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum Advisory Board, an independent membership-driven research network.
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14.
Previously, Baron Desai has worked as an Associate Specialist in the Department of Agricultural Economics, University of California, Berkeley, California.
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16.
Baron 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.
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17.
Baron Desai wrote Testing Monetarism, a critique of monetarism, in 1981.
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18.
Baron Desai's work was well received, with The Guardian stating 'If only socialists had studied Marx properly, they would have known all along that capitalism would triumph.
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19.
Baron Desai has described the book as his "greatest achievement".
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20.
Baron Desai discusses issues as varied as censorship, the iconic values of Indian machismo, cultural identity and secularism, and analyses how the films portrayed a changing India at that time.
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22.
Baron Desai was chairman of the Trustee's Board for Training for Life, Chairman of the Management Board of City Roads and on the Board of Tribune magazine.
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23.
Lord Baron Desai was a founding member of the Development Studies Institute at the LSE in 1990.
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25.
In 2007, Baron Desai was asked by the University of London to serve with Tony McGrew of the University of Southampton as one of the two examiners of the PhD thesis of Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the son of the then leader of Libya.
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26.
Baron Desai is chairman of the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum Advisory Board, an independent financial think tank which serves as a neutral, non-lobbying platform for exchanges among official institutions and private sector counterparties worldwide.
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27.
In 1970, Baron Desai married his LSE colleague Gail Wilson, his first wife.
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28.
Baron Desai is an atheist and is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society.
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29.
Baron Desai is a member of and an advisor to the 1928 Institute.
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