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.Collection: Faith
Independence day is an interesting time to reflect on our strange fealty to institutions that the British left us, including those that were explicitly set up to be used against us.Collection: Independence
When you compare individuals, rather than countries, you find that education improves both income and the quality of life.Collection: Education
I'm not an early morning person.Collection: Morning
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.Collection: Travel
It is undeniable that the looming environmental crisis is partly the consequence of population growth.Collection: Environmental
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.
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.
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 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.
Mamata Banerjee and Narendra Modi, the ultimate didi and dada of Indian politics, should really commiserate.
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.
If you are a natural scientist, a publication the journal Science carries enormous prestige.
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.
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.
Jawaharlal Nehru did a huge amount for education in India.
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.
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.
Corruption is a huge problem and the poor and the powerless are often its most egregious victims. But it is not an accident that the most effective bureaucracies in the world rely much more on internal controls rather than on independent ombudsmen.
I am no Rushdie. The only people who think of silencing me are my students, on days when my lectures are more opaque than usual.
In a world where audiences listen for attitudes rather than arguments or information, speakers must feel the pressure to posture rather than engage.
In the development business doing something for both women and the environment is the equivalent of holding a royal flush in poker.
The world's poorest people use the cheapest available fuels - dung and twigs and even leaves.
Milk production is one of India's great success stories.
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.
I have always found it difficult to wrap my head around population policies.
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.
The AAP was not the first group of well-meaning outsiders in politics.
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.
Here is an entirely banal idea that I think has the potential to change the world: Take evidence seriously. Taking evidence seriously does not mean privileging numbers over all other forms of knowledge - theories, narratives, images. Nor does it mean the kind of radical skepticism that questions everything to the point where no action is possible.
For me, psychologically, I am very much an Indian.
I think when I say my county, it is always India.
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.
When I was a graduate student, I actually took a course in development economics and I thought it was the most boring thing in the world.
I was trained as an economic theorist; my job at MIT was as an economic theorist. At some level that's still part of my identity.
What's nice about experiments is that they are much more closely tied to what theorists think about the world than normal empirical research. You can design your experiment to exactly ask the question you want to ask. This is not true about normal empirical research.
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.
You have to take it seriously that the economy is in crisis.
You don't boost growth by cutting taxes, you do that by giving money to people.
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.
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 you happen to be mostly depressed about the state of your life, I don't know whether you feel like doing impulse control.
Sometimes economists are right, and sometimes economists are wrong.
Partly, identity politics is a result of economic failure.
Most economies have a fair amount of tax evasion, depending on how their data systems are.
Celebrate the excitement of trying build something new and wonderful.
Most farmers know that their children's future will probably not be in agriculture, but they have a hard time imagining a different life.
We value seriousness and willingness to solve problems.
I am half Bengali and half Marathi.
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.