Ep. 67: Maanav Jhatakia - Rank of Master

Maanav recently completed his graduate degree at Delft University of Technology, where he earned a Master's of Science in Engineering & Policy Analysis. His thesis titled: "Evaluating Stability of Adaptive Water Allocation Strategies in the Eastern Nile Basin," looked at Transboundary Water Resources in the Eastern Nile Basin (ENB). His research was geared towards cooperative game theory analysis across the three countries reliant on the Blue Nile, Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia. Ethiopia sees the Blue Nile water as an opportunity for economic growth, recently building the 'Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam' (GERD). 

Using a model developed by his senior peer at Delft, Maanav tested public policy possibilities in a time-series method to determine what policy measures were most likely to be pareto-optimal; which policy choices would be reliable across all three countries. Successful negotiations for water allocations are critical and ideally negotiations should produce agreements with high-stability policies. High stability policies are those where no actor (state, org, etc) has an appealing unilateral gain in utility that would cause them to defect from an agreement. 

I spent a good deal of the episode asking Maanav about his research, which led us to talk about the Colorado River and our own state's demand for water resources. Colorado is one of only 3 headwater states in the U.S. and we historically have needed to support other states with our water, especially the southwest U.S. It was fascinating to pick Maanav's brain about water, both domestically and in the ENB. 

Later in the episode I got the chance to refresh Maanav's memory to tell him about one of my most favorite stories, the time our debate team went to his house for a year-end celebration, only to ultimately discover that "The house just beeps." Let me highly recommend you don't miss out on that story; true top-shelf quality. 

Thank you to Maanav for coming on the show, for sharing his smart mind with me (and you all), and for allowing me to ask him some questions about something he put so much work into over many months. I hope he sticks around Colorado so we can share more laughs in the coming months, but hey, if he ended up in the Netherlands, well then I have a great reason to come visit. 

FO& BW