Most economies have a fair amount of tax evasion, depending on how their data systems are.
— Abhijit Banerjee
If you happen to be mostly depressed about the state of your life, I don't know whether you feel like doing impulse control.
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.
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.
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 think when I say my county, it is always India.
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.
It is undeniable that the looming environmental crisis is partly the consequence of population growth.
Milk production is one of India's great success stories.
In a world where audiences listen for attitudes rather than arguments or information, speakers must feel the pressure to posture rather than engage.
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.
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.
Celebrate creativity and confidence in the face of adversity.
Most farmers know that their children's future will probably not be in agriculture, but they have a hard time imagining a different life.
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.
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.
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.
Partly, identity politics is a result of economic failure.
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.
You don't boost growth by cutting taxes, you do that by giving money to people.
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.
I am half Bengali and half Marathi.
For me, psychologically, I am very much an Indian.
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 world's poorest people use the cheapest available fuels - dung and twigs and even leaves.
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.
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.
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.
Celebrate the excitement of trying build something new and wonderful.
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.
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.
It is possible that Modi sees his life as evidence that hard physical work can triumph over every disadvantage, but if so, most of us Indians do not share his faith.
My sense of my own superiority over many of my classmates would have been much more muted if I knew that they had seen me failing miserably at woodwork or cross-stitch.
Sometimes economists are right, and sometimes economists are wrong.
People who live inside garbage piles - that should not be happening.
You have to take it seriously that the economy is in crisis.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the development business doing something for both women and the environment is the equivalent of holding a royal flush in poker.
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.
Jawaharlal Nehru did a huge amount for education in India.
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.
If you are a natural scientist, a publication the journal Science carries enormous prestige.
Mamata Banerjee and Narendra Modi, the ultimate didi and dada of Indian politics, should really commiserate.
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.
If people don't want blue-collar work, our labour costs will remain high and our competitiveness low.
