Yesterday, the winners of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics were announced: Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, and Michael Kremer.
This was super exciting! I worked for Esther and Abhijit from 2009 to 2013; I never worked for Michael, though he was in a lot of seminars (and was often remarked on by us lowly minions for how both insightful and kind his comments always were). I like to say I was Esther’s lowly minion (Research Assistant) for a year, and then got promoted to chief minion (i.e. Research Manager, yay) for three more years. Those were salad days indeed!
Their work has had a transformative effect on international development; working with them was also formative and special. A good overview of their work is Poor Economics. Their organization - the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) - also offers a MicroMasters on EdX, if you want to go more in depth. The World Bank had a good blog post on Monday about their impact on the field at large. A good overview of adjacent activities - the economics and development milieu in which their work can be situated - would be The Idealist (about Jeffrey Sachs, another top academic - who incidentally Esther RAed for long ago! - whose work has suffered in reputation lately), The Undoing Project (about the “founding fathers” of behavioral economics, which informs a lot of DufloBanerjeeKremer’s microeconomic views), and Inside Bill’s Brain on Netflix (the Gates Foundation is a big funder of J-PAL’s work).
And Esther is, as always, remarkable as an individual: she’s the second woman to win the Nobel (which should embarrass the Nobel deciderers, honestly) and the youngest winner too (!).
What wonderful news! Heartfelt congratulations to them!
Addendum#
I wanted to add a very insightful Twitter thread that Nick Hagerty (a friend and former colleague, as well as former PhD advisee of Esther’s) wrote, which - I think - contextualizes just what is so remarkable about Esther, Abhijit, and Michael:
In earlier econ culture, certain great men held special wisdom that was inaccessible to others without their help.
— Nick Hagerty (@hagertynw) October 14, 2019
Esther and Abhijit (+ plenty of others) not only pulled back this curtain but also showed everyone ways to start figuring out what we CAN know (however narrowly).
I agree.
