Esther Duflo: using economics research to rout out poverty

Esther Duflo - a young French professor of development economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - has devised a revolutionary approach to fighting poverty. But can her hands-on approach change lives?

The financial crisis has given renewed exposure to several schools of economic thought, says The Guardian. "You've heard of the Keynesians, the monetarists, the behaviouralists. Well, now meet the randomistas." Their driving force and poster girl is Esther Duflo, a 38-year-old French dynamo whose brand of "pragmatic idealism" has captured everyone from UN policymakers to hard-headed "philanthropreneurs". As Bill Gates told Duflo at a recent meeting: We need to fund you".

Why "randomista"? It's down to the way Duflo a professor of development economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) conducts her research, says The New Yorker. Borrowing from medicine, she subjects social-policy ideas to randomised control trials (conducted in villages in India, Ghana and Kenya), in the manner you would test a drug. Her conclusions are often counterintuitive (see below) and are changing the way people think, says Time. More than one billion people live on less than $1.25 a day. Yet very little is known about how they make economic choices and what might help ease their lives. Duflo "is changing that". Tipped to become a future Nobel prize-winner, her intellect has already won her a coveted MacArthur "genius fellowship" in the States. In France she's been hailed as the "new face of Left Bank intellectualism".

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