This Monday Abhijit Banerjee, 58, and Esther Duflo, 46 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), won the Nobel in economics this year. They were awarded with Nobel for their “experimental approach to alleviating global poverty”. Mr Banerjee is an Indian born while Ms Duflo who is the second woman to be awarded a Nobel in economics is a French native.
Both Mr Banerjee and Ms Duflo grew up with the sole aim of helping the poor by eradicating poverty. In a seminal work, Poor Economics, they wrote, “This urge to reduce the poor to a set of clichés has been with us for as long as there has been poverty. The poor appear, in social theory, as much as much in literature, by turns lazy or enterprising, noble or thievish, angry or passive, helpless or self-sufficient.”
Thoughts of Mr Banerjee and Ms Duflo About Poverty
“It is no surprise that the policy stances that correspond to these views of the poor also tend to be captured in simple formulas: ‘Free markets for the poor’, ‘Make human rights substantial, ‘Deal with conflict first’, ‘Give more money to the poorest’, ‘Foreign aid kills development’ and the like,” it added.
Back in 2003, they founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-Pal) at MIT to study poverty. They also urged governments and international institutions to rethink about their food policies. Providing more food grains- which most food security programmes do may not be able to help the poor since the core problem was not calories, but other nutrients.
They noticed that, “It is probably not enough just to provide the poor with more money, and even rising incomes may not lead to better nutrition in the short run. As we saw in India, the poor do not eat any more or any better when their income goes up; there are too many pressures and desires competing with food.”
They still hope that “poor countries are not doomed to failure because they are poor or because they have had an unfortunate history”. What really needs to be eradicated is “ignorance, ideology and inertia”.
Pic Courtesy: bbc
