Great Throughts Treasury
This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Esther Duflo
French-born American Development Economist, Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics at MIT, Co-Founder and Director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), a research network specializing in randomized evaluations of social programs, which won the BBVA Foundation "Frontier of Knowledge" award, John Bates Clark Medal, MacArthur Fellowship, Calvó-Armengol International Prize
"There’s no silver bullet. You cannot helicopter people out of poverty."
"If we don’t know whether [aid is] doing any good, we are not any better than the medieval doctors and their leeches."
"Programs are often borne in ideology. [An ideology that] the poor are entrepreneurs, or they are starving or they are slothful. [Programs] are conceived in ignorance of the reality of the field, and then they persist because once they exist there is a consistency for them to just continue. I think we need to fight against that."
"A big part of my work is to try and shift the conversation from whether aid is good or bad to think about policy or programs instead. Another objective of my work is to think about not just the five percent [of aid], but the 100 percent. [That is], what role this five percent can play in improving the quality of programs. I want to think about the efforts of most private donors…as not being an end in itself, but as being venture capitalism and finding the good ideas in development. In that case, think of each dollar you are spending as being multiplied many, many fold. If these programs help us identify what really works then that can be taken up as a policy on a very large scale. That is the reason for my work and the reason for placing so much emphasis on the evaluation of specific programs."
"From our position of being reasonably well off and comfortable, [perhaps] university professors, we tend to be patronizing about the poor in a very specific sense, which is that we tend to think, ‘Why don’t they take more responsibility for their lives?’ And what we are forgetting is that the richer you are the less responsibility you need to take for your own life because everything is taken care for you. And the poorer you are the more you have to be responsible for everything about your life… My lesson is to stop berating people for not being responsible and start to think of ways instead of providing the poor with the luxury that we all have, which is that a lot of decisions are taken for us. If we do nothing, we are on the right track. For most of the poor, if they do nothing, they are on the wrong track."