Words matter. These are the best Abhijit Banerjee Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
In a world where audiences listen for attitudes rather than arguments or information, speakers must feel the pressure to posture rather than engage.
Our democratic culture does not prioritise protecting an individual’s right to live life her way, especially if that is not our way or the way of the community.
The AAP was not the first group of well-meaning outsiders in politics.
Partly, identity politics is a result of economic failure.
The Korean government is the first to declare that if you replace people with machines you have to pay a tax. It’s a tax on robots. They make private companies internalise the social cost of unemployment. Social benefit is not the same as private benefit. We have to realise this.
In the development business doing something for both women and the environment is the equivalent of holding a royal flush in poker.
Insurance is important for protecting the health of people and Ujjwala is quite useful to low-income women.
If PM-Kisan is implemented well, it will leave some money in the hands of poor farmers.
Most farmers know that their children’s future will probably not be in agriculture, but they have a hard time imagining a different life.
Every nation necessarily inhabits a morally compromised space. All too often our ideals seem to be held to ransom by what we believe, rightly or wrongly, to be objective reality.
We’ve learned a huge amount from organisations like Seva Mandir and Pratham, for example. In my personal experience, these organisations work on a very large scale with very poor people.
Mass protests often get books or films banned, but very few people take to the streets to challenge the right of the State to decide what we can read or watch – it’s still someone else’s problem.
Gujarat is a pro-business state, where civil society organisations are comfortable with working to make sure that business does not suffer. Large parts of the rest of India, for better or worse, are very different.
If you want to leave move money in the hands of poor people, you cannot do it through personal income tax cuts. You have to just give them money.
You have to take it seriously that the economy is in crisis.
Good intentions and grand theories do not make a good programme. Programmes work best when they’re based on a detailed understanding of the problem being solved and how they are implemented on the ground.
Milk production is one of India’s great success stories.
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.
Policy change is nothing if it’s not patient work.
The tragedy of the UPA is not that it didn’t do anything, but that it is not able to take credit for what it has done. By staying silent when it should have been shouting from the rooftop and by protecting the guilty, it surrendered the governance agenda to AAP.
People who live inside garbage piles – that should not be happening.
I have learnt an enormous amount from talking to people on the ground.
In my own work, I have written about how our public sector bank officials avoid making any new lending decisions – because lending always exposes them to some (infinitesimal) risk of being blamed for the loan going wrong.
One does not have to agree with his views to be intrigued by the possibilities opened up by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s emergence as communicator/harangue-master in chief.
The investment climate in Gujarat under Modi has been very supportive of business interests; but it was the same under the Congress governments that came before him.
The degree of political pressure to make MGNREGA jobs available varies massively from state to state – which is why access to MGNREGA jobs is worse in a very poor state like Bihar than in a richer state like Andhra Pradesh.
I am half Bengali and half Marathi.
Like many free market economists, with whom he had little else in common, Nehru seemed to believe that people will find a way to get their children educated.
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.
I am not partisan in my economic thinking. We work with any number of state governments, many of which are BJP governments.
We need to learn to work with political systems that are not perfect instead of taking the view: let’s first fix the politics, then we’ll fix the rest.
If the BJP government, like the Congress party, had asked what were the numbers on the fraction of people under a particular income, would I have not told them the truth? I would have told them exactly. I would have been as willing.
Most economies have a fair amount of tax evasion, depending on how their data systems are.
One advantage of not being in power is that we can dream of reshaping the world exactly as we please.
Sometimes economists are right, and sometimes economists are wrong.
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.
Even Milton Friedman – doyen of radical free market thought – was willing to consider some government intervention into primary education on the grounds that it is unfair for children to not get a chance in life because they were born to poor parents.
Students often say things that they will one day change their minds about, but also things that change our minds when we think about them.
Well-designed subsidies help the poor make the best of whatever opportunities they have; poorly designed ones either do very little or actually make things worse for them.
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.
The problem of getting from home to the metro, BRT or bus stop makes many people take their cars to work. Why not start a fleet of electric buses that just circle through neighbourhoods connecting them to the various public transport hubs?
It is absolute poverty that you could end, but I think relative poverty is a whole other issue.
Celebrate the excitement of trying build something new and wonderful.
We might think we are very different from Pakistan but we are not; we are the same people, with the same capacity for warmth and passion and intolerance and violence.
A universal cash transfer in the form of a minimum guaranteed income would mean that automatically everyone has something to fall back on without having to deal with the vagaries of their local panchayat.
Mamata Banerjee and Narendra Modi, the ultimate didi and dada of Indian politics, should really commiserate.
I was an Indian with zero sense of caste till I was 20. That’s an unusual privilege but it came out of the fact that I was a middle-class Bengali.
If you are a natural scientist, a publication the journal Science carries enormous prestige.
The world’s poorest people use the cheapest available fuels – dung and twigs and even leaves.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Whenever we try something new, mistakes will happen. Seemingly good ideas will fail and need to be re-thought.
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.