YouSaid · the spoken record

Abhijit Banerjee

lines on the record: 77
first: 2019-12-30
most recent: 2019-12-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Listen carefully to other people's arguments and try to see what they are saying. And before you dismiss them, be mindful that they have thought about it, be respectful of what their argument is, and kind of unwind it carefully. He was ruthless about unwinding bad arguments, but he would do it in a way that's funny and non-confrontational. And I try, but I'm not as good as he is.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We angry about things that are wrong in society. My mother is very passionate. And she will just go on a tirade even now. She goes on a tirade about all kinds of things that she thinks are wrong and in a sense her passion is not unrelated to the economics. She thinks of the economics and says, but this economics is kind of backwards, that they can't possibly be that this is what the market needs to do to function. Where is it going wrong? And she doesn't necessarily always articulate the whole thought but her passion combined with a certain commitment to kind of thinking it through, I think, is just fabulous example for growing up. I mean, she was never, she would never be kind of passive about the bad things that are happening in the world.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the complexity. The complexity is often man made and sometimes unnecessary. Find the key place where the argument is failing or what gives leverage to the argument in both directions. And that's what I learned. And I think it's a fabulous way to be trained. With Eric, it's unnerving in a sense because he's so sharp that if you say something that's three extra pieces to the argument which are not needed, he'll spot them immediately. So you get trained to say that, look, this is the key point. Rest of it is we can build the infrastructure over it, but it's not going to change the core inside.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had two actually. Eric Masken and even maybe more pure theorist, Andrea Mascalel. Two absolutely fabulous supervisors. I can't imagine having better. What I learned was from, I think both of them, and especially, I think from Eric it's more, Eric is interested in the world. Andrea also actually eventually went into politics, but at that time he didn't, but what he did was he taught us that, you know, in the end there's lots of verbiage and there's a few ideas that are key. Just focus on that. And he would almost, when he would teach his advanced course, I don't know if you took one, he would just draw a picture and say that, look, this picture contains all the things that can go wrong. And this whole theorem is to show you conditions under which this doesn't happen. But think about the picture and you are in a sense done. I always think of that as being the key thing that I learned from both of them, which is have the discipline to pinpoint, don't get lost.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get them under people's skin so that they feel that I understand not just the theorem which I can write down and prove, but also that this is if I had to take it in my hand and use it to analyze a particular question, I'll feel confident in doing that.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is less useful than knowing how the insight of why complete markets deliver efficiency, understanding that is very useful, not because it describes the world, but because it gives you a very clear understanding of what is going wrong. We don't teach it as such, we teach it as here is a theorem about the world, we don't teach the people to wonder about here are 17 examples what's going wrong in this one. Spot the place where the assumptions are failing what's incomplete in this market and why is it that why does that potentially have big effects? I don't think we do a good job of making these things kind of”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trying very hard at MIT actually. I was on a committee which recommended that we get rid of the general exam and we just have instead have much more encouragement to start doing research early. I do feel that we sort of stun people with this much theory and this much macro is essential and often don't and there's so much. We teach them so much that they don't learn anything or they don't look enough because I think some level what maybe we got by having been at an early point is that we got a lot of portable insight. And portable is the keyword which is that you want to take the insight and apply it to something immediately rather than sort of know that yes there is this enormous edifice and the edifice can be built. That to me.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that training, I think, is still what makes me excited when I think about a new RC, I think about maybe we can try this, maybe we can try that. Now I teach PhD behavioral economics, so I've been educating myself in those things. So the hypothesis set are maybe a bit wider, but the same idea, which is that theory trains you to ask questions about what you could get wrong or where you could get confused or how to interpret a particular fact. Maybe I think naively that this means that, but it's not, actually, because if you think about it. And that was the great insight, I think, of the Chicago tradition. I think they used it often maybe to defend the status quo, but I don't think the insight was not wrong. I think the way they used theory was very, very appropriate, which is to be interrogative.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's the best thing about economics? Is that it gives you a toolkit? You interrogate things and you say, oh, well, it couldn't be that, it couldn't be that. Could it be this? And that training that we get, which is an excellent training of thinking through multiple hypotheses, that's what theory is about, is in a sense building ways to accommodate multiple hypotheses into the sparest narrative possible. So you want to see if these two forces are going to, which of them win out under certain conditions and that kind of thing is great because it trains you to think about all the forces at play in a particular context. So I think of economics as theory as being excellent training for the mind, that it gives you a way to ask I think it's this, but could it be that?”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was my supervisor? I think anandomized control trials are. In a sense, they appeal very much to a theorist, I would say. Because what's nice about them, and that's what I always tell people, is that it's really not about getting unbiased estimates. That's a sort of a red herring. Maybe you can get unbiased estimates in many different ways. What you can't do is design your treatment to follow what's inside your head. And I think what's very nice about randomized control trials and what made me real is to say that, look, if I want to keep digging into something, why is it not working? I can keep varying the treatment exactly based on my current hypothesis. So in some ways, I think this process of working on it is even more convinced me that this idea that we're going to do theory which is place and time independent is not helpful.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, not even in secret. I have a recent, I mean it's more that I do theory on and things that in a sense I was doing 30 years ago in social learning. So doing theory, but maybe a little more inspired by behavioral economics, a little bit inspired by the fact that maybe people don't make rational choices but have a 2019 paper on how people choose good rules for social learning, what are good rules for social learning? Will people choose them?”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I like that paper. I think it was a little too maybe Qt-C for the macro people to like it. They like properly all the bells and whistles that make macro models. They like it. We went for a very different idea with basically theorists, so we're trained to write models that just deliver what you wanted to deliver and not much else. So in that sense, I'm very proud of that paper. I think it's a good exercise. It never flew because I think people really wanted the bells and whistles that we didn't really provide. I think Paul Krugman for a while did some advertising or not that paper, but the sequel of that paper, which was on open economies. But I think most people, the most macro people, real macro people didn't see it as being, they thought it was too toy.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I see the airlines industry as being the first order problem the airlines is that, which is that it is designed to be unstable. The marginal costs become very low. You make a big investment, then you drive everybody else out. Then, of course, the prices go up. You see absolutely the Bertrand Edgeworth pattern, and you're seeing it right now in India where a bunch of airlines are going out of business because the prices were just too low at some level and the competition was too hard and Chet Airways has gone in and kingfish has gone India's. Basically now down to three and a half airlines.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe not. It's not clear to me that the welfare losses are that large. In a sense, the airline industry is, the problem of the airline industry is also this, you know, what in economics you were taught as Bertrand Edgeworth competition. You pay your fixed cost and then you compete the others out. So it's known to be unstable. We were taught that, you and I, we were taught that by Andrea, that the”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the fact that I belong to it in equilibrium, I should belong to them. Absolutely. I think that the airlines are completely turning the screws on you.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm only good at that, but I do go long on both investing in those people, making friends with those people, enjoying their company, and letting them tell me when things are going wrong and advise me when I'm thinking wrong. So I feel I get a great deal out of working with wonderful, brilliant people. JPAL is full of such people.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think lots of people are. I think somebody told me 43 different countries they are experimenting with it. I think this is the next stage where I think we are a bit proselytizers for this and we get called in. But actually the story is kind of doing the rounds. The governments, many state governments in India now want to just do it. And that's my exposure. In fact, today we were in a part of a long email exchange on exactly how it should be done in the state of Orisha in the east of India that wants to do it. So I think it's having some traction.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Scalable. I don't think it's difficult. I think it will need a change in, I think one thing this organization does well is it teaches people to be quite sympathetic to the one we worked with in Bengal, the one I know well. And they were just, I think the people we worked with were basically able to be sympathetic. It doesn't take much. It takes sympathy. But I think it's a matter of motivating people to do it, making sure that they feel. I mean, there are lots of people who work for NGOs after all, and there are often people who want to do things for the world, who are positive people. So I don't imagine it being that difficult. It will require investment in training a particular kind of person, but I don't know that it's any different from training somebody for collecting money in a microfinance organization. It's the same.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's an interesting question. I think it's a bit more than that. It's also saying you can do it, and here are the steps. I think turning things into a set of processes is important. Otherwise, it looks like a unlikely proposition that I can do it. I've never done it. I've never bought and sold things. In fact, I've never sold anything. And how do I do it? I think it's a matter of, it's a bit more than that. I think setting, turning things into process is important also. That here is how you get on a bus. You go there, you pay this much money, they give you something, you bring it back. I think one of the things they are doing is also turning it into a sort of procedural steps, which is very different from saying, go do that”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If it's a number X bus number, I don't know what X is. So, how would I know I'm getting on the right bus? So, all of these things are, you know, if you start from a place where you really never had a chance, I think it's useful to have some confidence building. You can do it too. There's nothing difficult about it.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, people who treat you with a little bit of contempt might help you with the treaty with a little bit of contempt as well. And this is the kind of people, I mean, at least the one that I was big part of studying was the one in India and also one in Ghana, especially the one in Bengal. And these women, they lived in, I mean, they were living in places where nobody should live. One said, oh, we get snakes all the time. Another one said, you know, I'm now vending knick-knacks in the village or basically cheap stone jewelry or plastic jewelry. Before the people from this NGO showed me where the market was to buy wholesale, I had never taken a bus. So I had no idea how to go there. So they had to literally put me on a bus, show me where to get off. And it took a couple of times because I'd never taken a bus. I didn't know whether I couldn't read.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So these people, we've actually done it without the coaching in Ghana and it doesn't work. So we have a reasonably confident that the coaching is doing something interesting. I wouldn't say does it necessarily for everybody, but the people targeted in this are the poorest of the poor. They're among the poor, the people who are really, and for them, I think confidence is an enormous issue because they've never actually done anything in their life successfully. They've been living hand to mouth, usually begging from people, getting some help. I think what that does to your self-confidence, your sense of who you are, I think those things we haven't even documented how”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Short supply chain. I mean, even now, people really pull out the vegetables in the morning and bring them to the market. If you go to the Garihat market in Kolkata, there's this part of Gurdihat market where you buy basically old ladies whose sons have sent them from their village to vend the okra that they've picked this morning. I mean, just freshness is such an enormous part of taste and also not designing food for durability. I mean, in the US, tomatoes are designed for durability and that takes away from other things.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those are the two as enormous variety again going from meat, chetinad food all the way to very, very proper vegetarian food and all that is really great. That part of the eastern south has great food.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, In my mind, only two competitions the competition is either Chennai or Hazarwath. I think Hazarwath has an even broader range of food in the sense that it goes from very meat-based and different styles of meat-based Nawabi cuisine. Andhradish is full of people who are sort of not vegetarian, the Hindu, not vegetarian, they eat lots of meat. The South actually is where meat eating is more common than in the north. Bizarrely enough, though we associate the South with vegetarian food. And Andhra Pradesh has fabulous food across the range. I mean, if you go to small towns in Andhra Pradesh, the meat, the vegetables, everything is stunningly good. Fish is stunningly good. So I would have picked Andhra Pradesh, but Tamil Nadu being the other possible is where Chennai.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's translatable. I do think that it needs somebody with lots of talent to do it and somehow that incentive hasn't, I think now there's a little more interest in doing it. In fact, Penguin has a series where they try to publish high-profile translations. I think we give an incentives. I think there is just so much great literature.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Any number of the vernacular writers who are not read, I would say among novelists I only really read Bangladesh, but that's not because that's not to say that there aren't other similar people in other languages, but Bivuti Bhashman Bhujan Bandavadhai, Tarashankar, Bandavadhai, Manik Bandabadhai, Shotinath Bhaduri, is amazingly good novel form literature from the twenties to the seventies. Also amazingly good poetry, both of which I think are just not read by anybody.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know enough to, I mean, it's growing fine. It's actually doing fine. And Indian growth is a bit faltering. So maybe it'll catch up. But I don't know. I wish I knew more about what makes Pakistan grow. I mean, after all, it still grows at 6%, which is not nothing. So I feel like who are we to sniff at 6% for many, many years? It's been growing at 6%. That's not nothing to laugh at.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think right it about right again. I don't think also I mean I think Tolstoy is wonderful but I think people think it's wonderful they don't read him but that's a separate question. Is he rated high? Yes, sure he's rated high. He's the canon.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Underrated. Why? I think people haven't quite understood how much how well it connects to the rest of economics. I think that seems to me that people think that this is some boutique exercise that's happening elsewhere. But in fact, it's changing economics. It's changing the way we do theory and changing the way we do policy analysis and the way we think about the world”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“rated about right. I think Balzag is great. I don't think in France anybody doubts that he's great. So he's sort of the canon. So I think he's not overrated or underrated.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's an anachronism. I think that training schools like SRA in Kolkata are very good. They make you listen to many different people. I think that that's actually a good thing for musicians to learn how to distinguish their tradition from other people's tradition. I think that the old norms were a little bit too parochial.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think through concertizing. I do think that if you look at the top echelon of these people, their fees have gone up a lot and they're in demand. I think that it's not clear to me that this is any worse than it ever was. I mean, it was always a little bit of a, you have to do it if you love it. You don't do it because you're going to make money. And the movie industry has always been quite generous. Also, he was a music director for many films, and he composed music for many films, etc. So Bollywood is actually a pretty good client for good classical musicians. And Bollywood is one of, I think, India's great successes.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And she sang an unbelievable concert in the old fog museum courtyard. It was probably the best concert I ever heard. But no, much younger women who are in their 30s, there are really some very talented ones, but I can't remember the names right now. I am blanking on their names. I would remember them as soon as I walk out of the room, but there's actually lots of talented people in their 30s, 40s. That's Indian classical music being the kind of thing it is. You never become a top artist till you are in your late 30s or something.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She was the best, I think. I would say, I mean, I heard her a few times live and when she sang well, I don't think anybody, she had a way of completely, I mean, I think what is difficult in Indian classical music is to keep the variation going and keep the musicality running. And some people do lots of variation, but they lose the sense of the overall music. She was amazing. At her best, and in fact, I heard her first time live at Harvard when we were students together in 1985.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, or certainly Venkites Kumar, but also I'm going to blank on the name of this young woman artist who I just heard who I thought was just fabulous.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, that's a separate question. The South is actually its own vocal tradition, which is completely different. Actually, don't know enough about it to say, I think the best vocalists typically right now come from Maharashtra and northern Karnataka. That's sort of this middle southwest. But the deep south has a completely different tradition, the thing in entirely different ways. The tradition that I listen a lot to is the tradition of Maharashtra and northern Karnataka. And that's where, to me, in my mind, the great home of classical vocal music right now is that part of India, the area kind of starting at Bombay, going down to Bangalore, that chunk of India's where the great classical musicians are.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say, and they both settled in Calcutta, so their children grew up in Calcutta, and they are the other great instrumentalists are these Calcutta-born, they went to the same high school as I did. Calcutta born not of Bengali families, but from very much the same culture. So I think Calcutta still is the place which produces the best instrumentalists.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right now, one of the best vocalists in India is a man who lives in Kolkata. His name is Rashid Khan. He's absolutely fabulous in my view. Maybe the best on a good day is the best that there is. He's not a Bengali. He's from Bihar, I think, and he comes and settles in Kolkata. I think a Hindi speaker by birth rather than a Bengali. So I don't think Bengal ever had top vocalists. It had top instrumentalists and Ravishankar, Ali Agbar Khan, Nikhil Manerjee. These were all Bengali instrumentalists. And even now, I would say the best instrumentalists, a lot of them either Bengali or a few of them are second Vilayath Khan and Ish and Imrath Khan were the two great non-Bengali instrumentalists of that period, I would say.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Bengal was never the place for vocal. So as a real addict of vocal Indian classical music, I would say if you look at the list of the top performers in vocal Indian classical music, no one... Really is a Bengali, in instrumental. Bengal was always very strong.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ways I feel that it's not obvious to me that if India was not as, the Hindus were not as divided, India may have gone in a much less liberal direction easily because there are other minorities and it could have been much more organized and anti-minority lines. Part of the division, the fact that the scheduled caste don't trust the upper caste, it might actually be a way of creating enough countervailing power, if you like.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“growth directly or because they just happen to be a way of ethnic organization. So whether without the caste system we would have had, like in Pakistan, Pakistan is a war zone between the Punjabis, the Pashtuns and the Sindhis, the MQM, the kind of the movement of Karachi is exactly the all of these people are fighting the Muhajias or the people who come from India. So it's a bunch of ethnic violence, whether India would have had other axes of violence, in a sense right now the Indian political economy is moving, I would say, a bit in the direction of trying to unify the Hindus against everybody, whether that works or not. I don't know. I'm not sure whether that's a desirable thing or not. I tend to think that diversity is helpful, actually.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that maybe he's, I mean, we don't know the counterfactual, maybe other things went wrong, I think certainly the fact that there was a liberalism that was built into the Neruvian state encouraged a certain type of person to stay Hindu-Muslim Christian, and the self-selection was important. I don't know all the ways in which that was these countries are different. It's a very interesting thought. I don't know whether I actually believe that I certainly believe the caste system is awful. I don't know whether I would think it's first order effects are on.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As an economist, but I think more importantly for him, he in his self-presentation, he was a liberal and he really believed in all the liberal values, freedom of speech. He had self-taught him, self kind of British 20th century philosophy quite well. I think it was Russell and G. Moore that he looked up to most and Russell is left, G. Moore is more center. That's his intellectual tradition rather than the Marxist tradition. He was very much of much more of a liberal than a leftist.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My father was a liberal. I think he was not a leftist, I would say, you know, relative to the Bengal spectrum at the time. I would say he was on the right.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With the world. And I think that's when from Tagore, who's basically a liberal, we moved to the left very quickly in the 40s. Tagore dies in 41. And after that, the Bengalis move quite sharply to the left. It started before. It's not that it didn't, there was elements of Marxist influence before. But I think the general move of Bengali intelligence to the left starts in the 1940s.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In Bengal is seen as being egregious, completely a callous government with maybe some sympathy for the people who control the rice supply created 3 million people die. Churchill sends ships that the Americans had sent with grains to India, sends them, doesn't let them come to India, sends them to help British troops elsewhere. So it creates, I think, extremely strong basis for the left. The left really becomes very powerful starting in the 40s. And I think the 40s is the Bengal famine is a defining event of that period. So I think that that's one of the biggest famines ever. It's such an egregious tragedy that I think a lot of people just feel that there's something deeply wrong.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not in Karakpur. That's about 100 miles from Calcutta. But I think those were already, by this time there is a national plan for these things. And even though it's a first one gets built, there's one in Bombay, one in Madras, one in Delhi, one in Kanpur. So every part of the country gets one. The first five IITs. And I think that was already conceived of as a single plan. But going back to the question of left, I think the left comes actually later. The liberals become left later, partly in reaction to just the horrors of the last years of British rule. In 1905, but most importantly, the Bengal famine just completely moves everybody to the left. Because the Bengal famine.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Contentious immediately with the conservatives pushing back against them and the liberal tradition then has actually a hard time not moving to the left. So it does move to the left, but partly because in reaction to a set of reactionary and completely meaningless reactions to the liberal tradition. So there were like a bunch of people who I think you can speak about them in hallowed voices. I could talk about them, but their views seem to be mostly, come on, this is foreign stuff we don't like it. And so I think the liberal tradition grew partly in reaction to conservative pushback. Conservative means conservative, I don't mean right or left, I mean conservative pushback.”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bentomite, yeah, exactly. Bentomite, but not so much bentham is his contemporary of benthams. He dies in eighteen twenty five or something. So he's a contemporary of bentham's. But he's absorbed all this and he writes in Persian a lot because that's the old, he's from the old aristocracy which was trained in Persian, but he writes about all these very important liberal ideas. He's a liberal in a very important sense in which he's much more than a leftist, he's a liberal. And I think that liberal tradition becomes extremely”
2019-12-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source