YouSaid · the spoken record

Esther Duflo

lines on the record: 71
first: 2019-12-18
most recent: 2019-12-18
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

“We do need diversity and experiences and point of views, etc., because people with different background, including gender and life experiences, will be interested in different questions and also will bring a slightly different perspective to those questions. So it would be a bit more, it would make the field more vibrant.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Incredibly crude tools, and in fact, both of these statements are, I think, wrong about the state of our discipline. In fact, we study any number of issues, including those, but also ultra-extreme poverty, discrimination, inequality. And we study them with lots of very sophisticated tools and relevant empirical tools, etc., and making, I think if people were more aware at an early age before they choose a field, there would be more women to start. Which I think is something we really need, not just women, but also minority because economics is a social science and as a social science”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Someone who gives a seminar gets the first 15 minutes uninterrupted. And that has, for our seminar, the development seminars. I think it's actually improved the experience for everyone, the speaker and the audience. So that's one, that's not huge, but think of this as one, you know, I'm not the magic bullet type of person and I don't think there is one there. One of the silver pellets you could do there. The other is not about There's something we could do outside of the economic profession, which is to change a little bit the image that economics has to the outside world. I think for a lot of high school students, college students, they are a bit like me when I was trying considering economics is like, oh, number one, it's like talk about interest rate and central banks and it's kind of boring. And number two, it goes at it with like...”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think there are two things that one could do. I don't know if there are reforms per se, but one is to change a little bit the climate in the economics profession. It's not particularly anti-woman per se. Some people argue it is people are, for example, more likely to interrupt women than men, etc. But even if they weren't, they're just in general likely to interrupt each other. We are not a very touchy villicur in economics. It doesn't bother me, it turns out, so that's not something that has stopped me in any way, but it bothers many people and it tends to bother women and I think minority more. So changing the culture, of course, is not a reform per se. But there are small things you can do that can help. One thing we've done at MIT, very simple, is to institute the rule.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the parts of India, which was some of the most extreme gender inequity. And she conducted her project like a master with a little group of largely female research assistants and got everybody to kind of go along with her.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think development economics is the most gender balanced subfield of all of economics, in fact, if anything, there are more women and more powerful women in development than men. So whatever it is, it does not stop them. And there are many, many women working on India. So, of course, you don't do silly things, and the advantage of working and of having this infrastructure that I was talking about before is that it makes it possible for people to always be in groups and to kind of work in a context where they are safe and at the same time they can get the experience of living in these environments. And I think that makes people often very aware that gender rights, for example, is something to study very deeply. So, for example, one of my graduate students, Maddie McElway, worked in rural UP and one of the region.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most of your intuitions are and preconceptions are, I can tell it to them till they are blue in the face to not let themselves be guided by what seems obvious to them. But until they've confronted what they think is obvious to something entirely different, then it doesn't come, it's not clear. Whether or not this is different from what my colleagues would say, I don't know. Maybe some of my colleagues would say that it's better off, you know, you're better off staying home and kanking some data and getting this type of skills.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I give them almost all of them the advice to take some time off and to in particular if they have any interest in development which is generally the reason why they come to see me in the first place but even if they don't really to spend a year or two in developing country working on a project not necessarily an RCT any project like spending time in the field This is what Michael Kramer did before he went back to graduate school, and I think that was determinant to him. This to some extent is what I did with Michael Russia experience, and this was clearly very central to me. It's only through this exposure that you can Learn how wrong”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, that's back. So I listened to back almost every morning. When I'm working, and in particular to back context. So that's kind of my morning music. Then in the afternoon, I kind of move on to more frontier stuff like Schumann or something like that. It's only after dinner that it moves to Bob Dylan. So definitely would be back, and it would probably be one of the passions, or if I could have two, I would take two passions, Saint-John and St. Matthew's passion.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In Western classica. Yes. To this, I truly love. And Indian Classica, I also love, but with no expertise whatsoever, was Tan Classical I grew up listening to forever. What interests me the most.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like it. I love it. It would be a stronger statement than I should because I'm not a connoisseur. But I visit my husband is really into it. So in fact, South India and North Indian both. We listen to it at home and we go to concerts whenever we are in India. Chennai is one place where we do a lot of work and JPAL has its headquarters and it has some of the best South Indian music. So I am like kind of an unenlightened amateur.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many things you can learn from rock climbing. One is that it's a bit like empirical economics. You kind of look at the wool and you have a decent idea of what might work. So you think of it as a But then when you tie it out, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. So that's kind of the data going in the way. It's also something you do socially. You do need another person to catch you if you fall and you need to pay attention to the other person. And a lot of economics is very social in this way. And it's not competitive, or at least not the way I do it. So it's kind of making slow and steady progress towards some goal.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To get married, they are more likely to have children out of wedlock, etc. So you do see this as one of the possible consequences of people's unhappiness.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Learned it at a very fundamental level. This is kind of a very fundamental mathematician. So it left me with some good instinct. Going back to the issue, I don't think Single Motherhood is a left-wing or right-wing issue. What would make it a social conservatism issue is to approach it from moral failing kind of a way. And what makes it a progressive issue is to approach it at the outcome of conditions in life that are potentially changeable or maybe it's the same thing. And we do talk about it a bit in the book, in particular, for example, one of the consequences of the fact that people are not mobile and that industries are clustered so that when there is a shock, everybody kind of suffers together, is that in those towns that are hit the most, you do see a kind of an erosion of these people are of this social norms. People are less like.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We kind of do have these issues as outcomes. I don't know why it's a right-wing issue to worry about single parenthood because, as you were saying, all of the data suggests that it's not a very good thing to go up as a kid of a single mom in 13. And it's not a good thing for the single mom in question either. So it seems to me that it's not a right-wing, left-wing issue. In fact, the person I know who is the most left-wing probably is my mom, and that's one of her key battle him to try and reduce teenage pregnancy in El Salvador.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's always difficult to compare two countries, but my bet, based on kind of extrapolating from the microstudy, is that that's not a financial, that's not a financial effect, because I think it comes much more from regulation. How much can you work anyways? And from the availability of jobs, the availability of part-time jobs, that's actually much less, partly also due to regulations, and less to individual effort response because they're thinking that they're going to be taxed away, that seems to me counterfactual.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's an income effect, but that's still you would think the income effect also creates a disincentive to work, at least that's in our model. That's why we're a bit worried of welfare. But you take the negative income tax experiment, in fact probably the first RCDs in the social science, as early as the 70s, they actually, what they were doing was kind of a Milton Friedman idea to kind of simplify welfare. But what they did in this experiment is to give people a certain level of income, but it was such that it was taxable way at a pretty cheap rate, so about 50% of the people were facing about a 50% marginal tax on their income. And even there, the labor supply response were so low.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The traffic ticket, I think, is much more than the financial incentive. If you get stopped by a traffic officer, you lose your right an instant. So I think there is the inconvenience is much, much bigger. So the point is not that we are trying to make is not that people are not sensitive to incentive because you can always construct incentive. If you construct broadly enough, then the incentive broadly enough, then it's almost always true. The point is also not that people are not responsive to financial incentive whatsoever. The point is that the bonds to financial incentives is less than what typically we assume is, both in terms of people seem to be pretty inertistic to taxes, both at all levels of income from the studies we have. People seem to be pretty inelastic to receiving money for sure. That doesn't...”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To this meaningful jobs question, which is this is also the time where the movement, the geographic movement would be not associated with finding a job in another furniture factory 200 kilometers away, but would be finding a job in a completely different sector where you would be starting from scratch and you're taking a job that you have no you think is demeaning.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not only that, but it's also the years where you start having a lot of geographically concentrated shocks because that's the 90s and 2000s is when trade with China picks up. So it's where entire town would seem that they should go and pick up. So precisely at the moment where the factors you point out would have made geographic mobility easier and there was also more of a need for people to move. This is when we see people move less. So we don't have the full answer to these questions, but I think it's a little bit related to”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But they don't always do, and they are more likely to be deriving meaning from their job if they have healthiest job for a long time. And if they've grown in expertise and in ranks in doing this particular job. So here the geographic mobility is coupled with, or the lack of geographic mobility is coupled with a lack of sectoral mobility, where people aren't just not particularly excited or not.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then those are some of the economic reasons. Then I also think there are one social reasons, which is people like to be part of a social network. They think it's profoundly human that we are not meant to be lonely. We are meant to live with our friends and derive some amount of meaning from our place in the social network and moving makes it difficult, especially if you're going to move to something that's completely unknown. You don't exactly know what you're moving to and why. And then finally, and that's one thing that I think we think we should start put in a little more in our economic model is the fact that it seems when you in surveys people Keep declaring one thing to derive meaning from their job.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then the polices that are not directly affected by the shock get hurt too because the guys who were working, they are less likely to buy guys and girls who are working are less likely to buy McDonald's and therefore the McDonald's wages goes down, et cetera, which then leads to a decline in the real estate prices. And people find themselves underwater on their market. And I think that prevents mobility because at least they have a house to live in if they don't go. But if they sell the house, they have nothing to get themselves another place. So that's kind of a purely economic factor. And on top of that, I think childcare is kind of an issue because a lot of people have childcare provided by their extended family. And you cannot move the entire family, again, maybe due to this real estate things. And then the childcare options are pretty bad in this country in general, especially for small kids once they start going to school. It's a bit better.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a big country. Exactly. So that explains why people aren't moving where a lot of the jobs are. But you're right, people could decide to move 200 kilometers away, not to a city, but to another place that happens not to be shocked by a shock. Now, there is the issue that in places where you would expect most people to move from are places which had been hit by economic shock, which is often clustered in nature because industry is clustered. So then when a region is hit by a shock that hit not just one company when everybody else is doing fine, but kind of all the companies because everybody was doing furniture or clothing or everyone was doing something that is being replaced by robots or something like that. You have a kind of equilibrium fact that then the places that are affected by the shock get hot.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there are a number of reasons, some that are strictly economic, as in financial, and some that are a little bit broader. So on the financial side, real estate is a big part of it, and that has been documented by other people and us.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For the downfall, we were already quite rich, and we have good standard of livings which we can make, in a sense, even better by addressing some of the issues that still remain in the Japanese society. And they did some of that, but on top of that, they also said, let's try and make growth come back. And there was this sort of Keynesian spending spree that I don't think have any impact on growth, but puts them in a not particularly desirable microeconomic situation at the moment.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“while they've bought themselves a pretty big debt level which could become a debt crisis in the making, and which was kind of entirely unnecessary because when growth fell down in retrospect, of course, you always have 20-20 hindsight. But when growth fell down in Japan, there was a reason for that, which is the population was aging. The working population as part, as a share of the overall population was therefore becoming smaller. So it is not surprising that there would be a slowdown in the growth of GDP per capita. For a while, it was compensated by the fact that there was a lot of TFP growth, but that wasn't necessarily going to come forever because we don't really know where TFP is coming from. So at this point, they could have said, well, you know, sit, let's do exactly what you said they should do, we should manage expectation for the...”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One example is Japan, for example. I think they did fall in love with the growth rate. Instead of kind of trying to think, well, you know, maybe there is a reason why the gross rate have fallen down. We should be kind of comfortable with that and do the best with what we have.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one should have healthy respect for gross rates and treat them as useful companions and people that you have to make work for you. So I think we should think, of course, rate as, you know, chief of staff, not as things we should fall in love with. And I think one issue that countries have had when they've fallen in love with growth rate per se as opposed to why is it you want growth in the first place is that going back to the early conversation, it's pretty hard to manipulate growth rate for politicians, especially fluctuation in growth rates. And therefore, if things are not going your way and you try more and more crazy things to try to make growth come back because that's what you've fallen in love with, then you can put yourself in pretty bad corner.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not on the wall of my house in Boston, but it's in a book of quotes that were on the wall of Paris. It's a little red book that was in my parents' book self, which I was, you know, I read as a kid and I kept in my mind that I knew we had that and was looking for, it could come handy at some point. And it has a lot of this quote from 1968. Some of them are more well-known than others like Soul Pavel Laplage is one of the most well-known under the pavement. You have the sea and this one, which I found when we were working on the book and I wanted to, it was kind of the epigraph of one of the first draft of the chapter on growth, then somehow I think didn't make it in the final cut.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the Nouvelle Wag is still not surpassed in a way. And so, in particular, Godard, you watch Pr ⁇ ncarmen and nobody has made a movie like that.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, so many things that's not above my finger. Like there's so much inside my playgrade. I grew up watching. Movies. The French system is such that in the first two years of undergraduate, you work like a mad person, and then you can pretty much take vacations for the rest of your life. So I decided against the rest of my life thing after going to Russia and all that. But in between, I had this one year where I used to go to the cinema about three or four times a week. So I had a chance to get groomed in the American classic, French classic.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, no, I appreciate that, but that might be above my peak rate, even with your elevator. What the commission seems to say about that, and I'm just going to par someone like Auguste Alandier, is the idea that in the US, feeling is quite all right, like bankruptcy is not really a problem, bankruptcy laws are reasonably easy to navigate, and there is not much stigma associated with failing. And so people are, so there is more churn in the system, and that produces a bunch of horrible companies, but those die, so we don't see them, and that produces some good ones. And the French system is less encouraging of failing, and that is less conducive to lots of thousand flowers blooming, and hence there is no new things. But I'm repeating something which is not deeply original.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He had almost can predict what you're gonna think about Donald Trump. And that's crazy. So people are so concerned about what they do. Not only they feel that they have to invest a ton in their children, but also, and they feel inadequate if they are not able to, but also that exactly what they do kind of creates them as people. So in France, that's kind of not there. And I think that makes everybody so much more bleed back, children and adults.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, very much so. Very much so, very much so. You know that book Bringing Up So I think she picked up on something which is rang so true to me, which maybe is a more general point about the US versus France. In France, people are reasonably content to just go with the flow and do, you know, what everybody does. So every kid eats the same thing at 4.30 and have dinner at the same time and kind of has gone through the same experiences, learned the same songs. And everybody thinks they are totally free, but in fact they're all on this kind of pretty sensible railroad. And also they don't agonize about it. In the US, child rearing is one more occasion to make a statement about your identity. So you're the kind of mother that carries the baby or you're the kind of mother that put the baby in a stroller and somehow that's”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“System, I do think it has roots in 19th century France and the Republic of the Teachers and both inclusive and demanding system at once. And I think to some extent I'm the product of that. But I also think that we've a little bit left it crumble. So I do hope that we kind of can recover it.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, old do I wonder where they are if we look in a generation or the current kids who are in school we will find the same thing because I'll tell you exactly why the current PISA and Tim's results show France exactly at the Median in terms of the scores but with a lot of heterogeneity with excellent results at the top and really bad results at the bottom and the second thing that this test scores also show I think it's the teams the math scores is the strongest coalition of the OECD country between your socioeconomic class and your score so this is the place where being in a bottom quintile of socioeconomic class incomparental income is the most predictive of being in the bottom quintile of the mass performance so I do think we historically have an excess”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Russia was extremely, extremely hard place to live in at that time. Extremely violent just the day to day and it was the end of communism, but it was mafia was out there placing it and people were really, some people were really extremely poor. They were given these vouchers, but they quickly extend them. You saw this woman queuing near the subway with one fish to sell. And the whole thing was so hard. Like everything was hard. So it was a difficult environment. I assume it still is, but I haven't really gone back since then.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reasonable thing to do, but at the time it sounded like completely happy moment. There was a truck that was delivering bread, and so it was the end of communism. And someone gave me that fascism near preot placard and asked me to hold it and I was like, sure, I'm going to hold it. So I'm holding my placard. We stayed there for a long time when things were happening. And next time I saw, in the evening, my parents called me that, what are you doing? Because it turns out that that image was on all the TV in the world. And that's how I very briefly became the kind of the face of this revolution. So that photo was then in a book. The guy never knew who I was. And recently he kind of put two and two together.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we actually watch TV, and I do remember those gicats they were called fascist communists, old, half-ecopied, half dead, making the coupon. We were a bit shocked. And with my friend, we decided that we would go out in town to see what's happening. And we went. And we went towards the White House, and we couldn't see very well because there were a lot of people. So we saw this trolley and I said, let's go up. We are going to have a good view of what's going on. And we went to the top of the trolley. And it was amazing because there was an immediate front.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was a bus, and it was me, it was me. So that was in 1991. So this is not when I lived one year there. I lived one year in 1993-94. But this was in 1991. I had gone to Russia about every year since I was a teen to learn Russian. And I happened to be there the summer where there was this putsch against Gorbachev.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Useful. And so that's why I decided to go to Russia under the pretext of writing my master thesis, but really to get some exposure to the world. And this is when I saw economic inaction. Because I was the research assistant of the research assistant of Jeff Sachs, whom I never met in this occasion, but was kind of hustling for them. And I thought, you know, I didn't necessarily agree with everything they were doing, but I thought that they had the luxury to think about things and then to be heard by policymakers when they had something to say. And I said, wow, this is like the best job in the world. And I still think that.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I was exposed to the typical Econ 101 course, the fund version of it with indifference curve and all that does. Thought it had no. That it was so far removed from any real person's life that it could not possibly be useful. I also was skeptical that it was extremely ideological that, you know, if you want to show that minimum wage is bad, then it's very easy to write a supply demand curve on an horizontal line. Lo and behold, minimum wage is bad and redistribution perverts incentives. And I thought the conclusions were a little bit too directly coming from the assumptions that were put in. So I had only done economics initially because I wanted to do economic history. And then I thought, okay, I'm done with this whole economics business. At the same time, I was a little bit dissatisfied with history for different reasons, in particular because I thought it's not very immediately.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the beginning, there was a lot of ways that the Soviet Unions could have gone. It could have gone more market friendly way, which is sort of what Lenin was hoping at some point. He was going a completely utopian. Everybody lived together, kind of crazy way. And then there was a Stalin thing, which finally the form that they kind of adopted, which was sort of boring, inefficient dirtism. All of this played out in how they represented their construction sites, like the big dam on the Niep. So this is how both economics and the narrative about economics were used to consolidate power and to consolidate grip on society.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is my master thesis in history. And I was interested in the time in propaganda. Not so much the first five-year plan per se, but how over this period the tok and the use in propaganda of the big construction sites evolved. So early in, you know, this is also the period where Stalin consolidated power.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is telling us that noncognitive skills is such a very important part of human capital, and then you want to ask yourself the question, well, how do cognitive skills get produced? How non-cognitive skills get produced? And that's kind of what kind of willy-nilly lands you to much more specific policy advice and hence potentially things that you can start running RCT on.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even if it didn't, then it's not a big bet to invest in education anyway because worse come to worse people would be educated, which seems to be a good means to an end. It could end in itself. It's not just a means to an end. But then the question becomes, so I will kind of totally go with this repression in human capital is super important. In fact, it is what I think was the original impulse of Michael Kramer when he worked on the first RCT. He was coming from growth. And he thought, wow, human capital plays a big role in growth. Now, what human capital once you said education is important, you have to start unpacked his question. Is it years of education? Well, not really, clearly if people kids learn nothing. That's not so useful, so it has to be learning, then you can start asking yourself questions over whether it's like cognitive skills or non-cognitive skills or a mix of the two, say, like Heckman.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a gross accounting matter, which is what fraction those differences, what's the correlation between how much of the gross is explained by differences in human capital across country? It seems to be that human capital play a role, a big role, even though the monkey, Roman wild figures gone down since then with the work of Kazali, for example. But it is important. Some of it is correlation rather than causal effect, that countries that have been good at increasing education have been good at doing other things. Also countries that have grown fast also generate an incentive to invest in education. That's all people by Bills and Kleinow that kind of nicely makes this point. But the bottom line is that I'm totally ready to believe that human capital broadly defines education in particular plays a big role in growth. And to tell you the truth,”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because the path of Ethiopia, even how the steps that they had to take to kind of carve out a place in international trade, for example, is very different from what a country like China had to do just by virtue of China existing, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm certainly not saying that good policymaking is not feasible. I'm just saying that we haven't found, it seems to me, empirically, we haven't found like a series of prescription that we could give to countries saying if you do this thing, it's going to work out. And similarly now, growth is slowing down in India. I don't think, at least I wouldn't know what to tell them what to do, like what they are supposed to do now. I don't think they also, I don't think themselves know. So that's kind of what has turned out to be difficult empirically. This is not.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's why I picked Ethiopia because, in a sense, they have. So again, they have their own path, but the thing is their own path becomes so particular. I'm not saying that good policymaking is not feasible because we have lots of examples of good policymaking and lots of examples of bad policymaking, actually. But the good policymaking is so varied that at a scientific level it becomes very quickly good things are good”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source