Deepak Lal, pipe-smoker and economist, 1940-2020
Sunday, May 24, 2020 at 19:22 
Very late to this but I only read last week that economist Deepak Lal had died in London on April 30.
Born in Lahore in 1940, he studied and later taught at Jesus College, Oxford. He also taught at University College London and UCLA in California.
His bibliography includes ‘Smoke gets in your eyes: The economic welfare effects of the World Bank-World Health Organisation global crusade against tobacco’, which was published in 2000.
The only time I met him was in 2016 when he and his wife Barbara attended the Forest Freedom Dinner as guests of the Academy of Ideas’ Claire Fox.
He was a “passionate” pipe-smoker so I think he rather enjoyed the event. The photo above was taken after dinner on the smoking terrace at Boisdale of Canary Wharf.
I had a brief chat with him - not about economics, thankfully - and he was very charming.
The Critic published an appreciation of him here and there were also obituaries in Business Standard, an Indian publication, and the Telegraph.
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