Abhijit Banerjee
Economist
1961-02-21
Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee is an Indian American economist who is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), an MIT based global research center promoting the use of scientific evidence to inform poverty alleviation strategies
Books by Abhijit Banerjee
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Understanding poverty
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Quotes by Abhijit Banerjee
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My parents were not poor, I mean we were a very average middle-class family of academics, but my grandfather happened to have built house literally next to one of Kolkata's largest slum.
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There is nothing remotely dignified about sorting through rotting trash to find something to feed your child, or asking someone for money because you have none (anyone who has contrived to give people money before they had to ask will never forget the look of gratitude in their eyes).
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We are specialists who have something special to say. We have had no problem with working in any state interested in evaluating their policies.
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I am not partisan in my economic thinking. We work with any number of state governments, many of which are BJP governments.
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Good intentions and grand theories do not make a good programme. Programmes work best when they're based on a detailed und�er�standing of the problem being solved and how they are implemented on the ground.
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One problem with globalisation is that bad ideas seem to travel faster than good ones; first there was smearing tomato ketchup on everything; then drinking sugar-soaked cocktails ('Cosmo'-politanism) instead of our traditional whisky soda, and now this idea that we should abandon the poor to their fate in order to protect their dignity.
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The world's poorest people use the cheapest available fuels - dung and twigs and even leaves.
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Catastrophic health shocks do enormous damage to families both economically and otherwise, and are easy to insure, because nobody gets them on purpose. On the other hand, insurance policies that only treat certain catastrophic illnesses are hard to comprehend, especially of you are illiterate and unused to the legalistic nature of exclusions etc.
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I was very lucky to be born into a very academic family. I was well-read, well-trained in mathematics. I had lots of advantages to start with.
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We value seriousness and willingness to solve problems.
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I mean, I think it's a two-way relationship: I think you should not have too much faith in your own rationality. You should not have too much faith in the rationality of, you know, anybody else either. We all learn together about the way the world is, and I think it's a sort of antidote to wishful thinking of all kinds.
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Celebrate the excitement of trying build something new and wonderful.
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My sense of my own superiority over many of my classmates would have been much more muted if I knew that they had seen me failing miserably at woodwork or cross-stitch.
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