One problem with globalisation is that bad ideas seem to travel faster than good ones; first there was smearing tomato ketchup on everything; then drinking sugar-soaked cocktails ('Cosmo'-politanism) instead of our traditional whisky soda, and now this idea that we should abandon the poor to their fate in order to protect their dignity.
Abhijit Banerjee
Climate change is something that we cannot fix alone - it is the original collective action problem - it will not work unless almost all the large economies of the world act together.
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.
What makes a leader great is not the fact that she (or he) has all the answers, but the ability to inspire and empower us to find the answers.
Celebrate creativity and confidence in the face of adversity.
Public conversations about who we are and who we want to be are key to the vitality of our democracy, and leaders can seed those conversations when they speak out their own views.
When you compare individuals, rather than countries, you find that education improves both income and the quality of life.
Milk production is one of India's great success stories.
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.
If people don't want blue-collar work, our labour costs will remain high and our competitiveness low.
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.
If PM-Kisan is implemented well, it will leave some money in the hands of poor farmers.
It is absolute poverty that you could end, but I think relative poverty is a whole other issue.
If democracy is to be an articulation of mutual respect, a leader in a democracy leads by showing respect to all.
Investors don't like being in a world where everything is held up by and waiting for an approval from a very small number of people.
Most economies have a fair amount of tax evasion, depending on how their data systems are.
If democracy as we know it has to survive the elites have to regain their credibility. And they have to start by admitting that their economic model is broken.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you are a natural scientist, a publication the journal Science carries enormous prestige.
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.
Most farmers know that their children's future will probably not be in agriculture, but they have a hard time imagining a different life.
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.
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.
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.
It is undeniable that the looming environmental crisis is partly the consequence of population growth.
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.
If there can be films about why hockey (and not just cricket) is cool, there can be a film or two about the virtues of honest, hard work.
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.
The AAP was not the first group of well-meaning outsiders in politics.
I have always found it difficult to wrap my head around population policies.
The BJP must nurture the institutions that put credible checks and balances in place.
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.
To insist that no one can support the interests of the aam aadmi without being one himself is like saying that no man can support women's rights.
The AAP from the beginning made it clear that they were about changing policy and not being a symbol of purity in a corrupt world.
This is why universities, and civil society more generally, are so important for a democracy like ours, founded on a genuine idealism that we have a hard time holding on to. They provide a space to question whatever we are doing in the name of things we say we believe in or might believe in.
Insurance is important for protecting the health of people and Ujjwala is quite useful to low-income women.
I'm not an early morning person.
I mean, I think it's a two-way relationship: I think you should not have too much faith in your own rationality. You should not have too much faith in the rationality of, you know, anybody else either. We all learn together about the way the world is, and I think it's a sort of antidote to wishful thinking of all kinds.
I have learnt an enormous amount from talking to people on the ground.
I was very lucky to be born into a very academic family. I was well-read, well-trained in mathematics. I had lots of advantages to start with.
So, I went to Harvard and I got exposed to American work habits. I didn't even realise for a while that I was behind. I kind of had the illusion that I was understanding things. But people worked so hard and the thing I learnt first in America was that people work incredibly hard.
In terms of being a professional, I want to be professional with everyone.
I am not partisan in my economic thinking. We work with any number of state governments, many of which are BJP governments.
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.
We are specialists who have something special to say. We have had no problem with working in any state interested in evaluating their policies.
We value seriousness and willingness to solve problems.
I think it is a very important point for India to create a bureaucracy that lives on the ground and gets its stimulus from how life is on the ground.
