Intro
Esther Duflo is a French-American economist and a professor at MIT. As a co-founder of MIT’s Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), she has spent her career researching the economic lives of the world’s poorest people, and finding ways to alleviate poverty that are grounded in behavioral science. In 2019, she became the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics, which she won alongside Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer.
Laypeople and economists alike have a tendency to simplify poverty and the people who experience it, leading them to suggest policies and aid campaigns that are overly reductive. Instead of following suit, Duflo and her colleagues take an experimental, evidence-based approach that has revolutionized the way social policy research is done. According to J-PAL, the initiatives led by the institute and others in its network have directly affected policy in 28 countries, reaching over 400 million people.1
All too often, the economics of poverty gets mistaken for poor economics: Because the poor possess very little, it is assumed that there is nothing interesting about their economic existence. Unfortunately, this misunderstanding severely undermines the fight against global poverty: Simple problems beget simple solutions.
– Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, Poor Economics
