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.
— Abhijit Banerjee
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.
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.
Gujarat is a pro-business state, where civil society organisations are comfortable with working to make sure that business does not suffer. Large parts of the rest of India, for better or worse, are very different.
The tragedy of the UPA is not that it didn't do anything, but that it is not able to take credit for what it has done. By staying silent when it should have been shouting from the rooftop and by protecting the guilty, it surrendered the governance agenda to AAP.
Whenever we try something new, mistakes will happen. Seemingly good ideas will fail and need to be re-thought.
If democracy is to be an articulation of mutual respect, a leader in a democracy leads by showing respect to all.
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.
My guess is that while the elites would like cleaner air, they are not willing to give up the convenience of being able to use their cars at will to get it, perhaps because they believe (I suspect incorrectly) that they can protect themselves from the consequences of vehicular pollution by investing in air-conditioners and air purifiers.
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.
Catastrophic health shocks do enormous damage to families both economically and otherwise, and are easy to insure, because nobody gets them on purpose. On the other hand, insurance policies that only treat certain catastrophic illnesses are hard to comprehend, especially of you are illiterate and unused to the legalistic nature of exclusions etc.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not an early morning person.
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.
Well-designed subsidies help the poor make the best of whatever opportunities they have; poorly designed ones either do very little or actually make things worse for them.
The first time I went to the Planning Commission was when it was under KC Pant, a long time ago. Since then I have been back there many, many times to the point where the many people who seem to spend their lives sitting outside the various offices and even the patches of grime in the hallways and stairwells began to look familiar.
I will confess that in general decisiveness worries me; it is often an excuse for being impatient with the details or insufficiently sensitive to other people's concerns.
The investment climate in Gujarat under Modi has been very supportive of business interests; but it was the same under the Congress governments that came before him.
We will remember UPA 2, if at all, it seems, as that period when things went mysteriously wrong - for the bribe-taking, buck-passing, foot-dragging, and general sense of paralysis.
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.
Anyone who has a child knows the importance of not over-playing your hand. He was up all night playing some game on his smartphone and you feel like saying that if it happens again the phone is gone. Forever. Till he is old enough to buy his own. Till then he can have your old Nokia.
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.
The problem of getting from home to the metro, BRT or bus stop makes many people take their cars to work. Why not start a fleet of electric buses that just circle through neighbourhoods connecting them to the various public transport hubs?
It is absolute poverty that you could end, but I think relative poverty is a whole other issue.
We've learned a huge amount from organisations like Seva Mandir and Pratham, for example. In my personal experience, these organisations work on a very large scale with very poor people.
We value seriousness and willingness to solve problems.
I am not partisan in my economic thinking. We work with any number of state governments, many of which are BJP governments.
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.
I have learnt an enormous amount from talking to people on the ground.
If PM-Kisan is implemented well, it will leave some money in the hands of poor farmers.
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.
There is nothing remotely dignified about sorting through rotting trash to find something to feed your child, or asking someone for money because you have none (anyone who has contrived to give people money before they had to ask will never forget the look of gratitude in their eyes).
Policy change is nothing if it's not patient work.
The BJP must nurture the institutions that put credible checks and balances in place.
One advantage of not being in power is that we can dream of reshaping the world exactly as we please.
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.
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.
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.
Every nation necessarily inhabits a morally compromised space. All too often our ideals seem to be held to ransom by what we believe, rightly or wrongly, to be objective reality.
We might think we are very different from Pakistan but we are not; we are the same people, with the same capacity for warmth and passion and intolerance and violence.
When you compare individuals, rather than countries, you find that education improves both income and the quality of life.
Healthcare expenses often wipe out families.
We are specialists who have something special to say. We have had no problem with working in any state interested in evaluating their policies.
In terms of being a professional, I want to be professional with everyone.
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.
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.
Insurance is important for protecting the health of people and Ujjwala is quite useful to low-income women.
