Abhijit Banerjee Quotes

Abhijit Banerjee is an Indian-born economist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2019. He is known for his research on poverty alleviation and development economics. Banerjee's work has influenced global policies and has shed light on effective strategies for addressing social and economic challenges in developing countries.

To insist that no one can support the interests of the aam aadmi without being one himself is like saying that no man can support women's rights.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt eventually became the greatest liberal leader of 20th century United States, but he started as a fiscal conservative. His greatness is founded in his willingness to change his mind to save his country from the Great Depression.

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.

Most economies have a fair amount of tax evasion, ... -Abhijit Banerjee

Most economies have a fair amount of tax evasion, depending on how their data systems are.

Celebrate creativity and confidence in the face of... -Abhijit Banerjee

Celebrate creativity and confidence in the face of adversity.

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.

I will confess that in general decisiveness worries me; it is often an excuse for being impatient with the details or insufficiently sensitive to other people's concerns.

The poverty line in the U.S., for example, has nothing to do with the poverty line in India. It is a relative poverty line. It is reset from time to time but it is related to U.S. median income, so if I set that to be the absolute poverty line everyone in India would essentially be poor.

Corruption is a huge problem and the poor and the powerless are often its most egregious victims. But it is not an accident that the most effective bureaucracies in the world rely much more on internal controls rather than on independent ombudsmen.

Most farmers know that their children's future will probably not be in agriculture, but they have a hard time imagining a different life.

One great pleasure of being an academic is the ability to trade in ideas with your colleagues and students; it is not much fun being the only connoisseur of some fine point.

Celebrate the excitement of trying build something... -Abhijit Banerjee

Celebrate the excitement of trying build something new and wonderful.

What's nice about experiments is that they are much more closely tied to what theorists think about the world than normal empirical research. You can design your experiment to exactly ask the question you want to ask. This is not true about normal empirical research.

If people don't want blue-collar work, our labour costs will remain high and our competitiveness low.

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.

Jawaharlal Nehru did a huge amount for education i... -Abhijit Banerjee

Jawaharlal Nehru did a huge amount for education in India.

I think it is a very important point for India to create a bureaucracy that lives on the ground and gets its stimulus from how life is on the ground.

I am no Rushdie. The only people who think of silencing me are my students, on days when my lectures are more opaque than usual.

Partly, identity politics is a result of economic ... -Abhijit Banerjee

Partly, identity politics is a result of economic failure.

Discovering the context

The speaker argues that economic disparities contribute to the emergence of identity-based politics.

One big mistake that we made in Delhi is that we made it a low-rise city which means that rich people have nice green colonies while the poor live in dusty areas.

Insurance is important for protecting the health of people and Ujjwala is quite useful to low-income women.

When I was a graduate student, I actually took a course in development economics and I thought it was the most boring thing in the world.

Will we make all poverty history? No. But can we solve some of these extreme and egregious forms of poverty? I think yes, and we should.

There is no doubt that in the last years of the UPA's rule, a certain lethargy had set into the way the central government went about its business.

If democracy as we know it has to survive the elites have to regain their credibility. And they have to start by admitting that their economic model is broken.

Sometimes economists are right, and sometimes econ... -Abhijit Banerjee

Sometimes economists are right, and sometimes economists are wrong.

Policy change is nothing if it's not patient work.... -Abhijit Banerjee

Policy change is nothing if it's not patient work.

Independence day is an interesting time to reflect on our strange fealty to institutions that the British left us, including those that were explicitly set up to be used against us.

For me, psychologically, I am very much an Indian.... -Abhijit Banerjee

For me, psychologically, I am very much an Indian.

The AAP from the beginning made it clear that they were about changing policy and not being a symbol of purity in a corrupt world.

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