Abhijit Banerjee’s approach to alleviating global poverty brings Nobel for him
| Date :15-Oct-2019 |
STOCKHOLM :
INDIAN-AMERICAN Abhijit Banerjee, who won the 2019 Nobel Prize for Economics jointly with his wife Esther Duflo and another economist Michael Kremer on Monday, is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the US-based Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Banerjee, born in 1961 in Mumbai, bagged the award for his “experimental approach to alleviating global poverty”. The 58-year-old economist received his PhD in 1988 from Harvard University. He also studied at the University of Calcutta and Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University. In 2003, he founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), along with his French-American wife Duflo, who is also a MIT professor, and Sendhil Mullainathan..
He remains one of the lab’s directors, according to the MIT website. Banerjee is a past president of the Bureau for the Research in the Economic Analysis of Development, a Research Associate of the NBER, a CEPR research fellow, International Research Fellow of the Kiel Institute, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society, and has been a Guggenheim Fellow and an Alfred P Sloan Fellow and a winner of the Infosys prize. He is the author of a large number of articles and four books, including ‘Poor Economics’, which won the Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in 2011. The ‘Poor Economics’ has been translated into more than 17 languages. “Why would a man in Morocco who doesn’t have enough to eat buy a television?
Why is it so hard for children in poor areas to learn, even when they attend school? Does having lots of children actually make you poorer? Answering questions like these is critical if we want to have a chance to really make a dent against global poverty,” Banerjee wrote in the book ‘Poor Economics’. He is the editor of three more books and has directed two documentary films. He also served on the UN Secretary-General’s High-level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda, the website said. Duflo, born 1972 in Paris, received her PhD in 1999 from MIT. In her research, she seeks to understand the economic lives of the poor, with the aim to help design and evaluate social policies. Duflo is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics at the MIT.
She has worked on health, education, financial inclusion, environment and governance. Duflo’s first degrees were in history and economics from Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. She has received numerous academic honors and prizes including the Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences (2015), the A.SK Social Science Award (2015), Infosys Prize (2014), the David N Kershaw Award (2011), a John Bates Clark Medal (2010), and a MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship (2009). With Banerjee, she co-authored the book, ‘Poor Economics’. Duflo is the Editor of the American Economic Review. She is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.
Went back to sleep after hearing news about Nobel Prize: Abhijit Banerjee: Nobel winner Abhijit Banerjee went back to sleep after getting the news from Stockholm on early Monday morning that he and his wife Esther Duflo and Harvard’s Michael Kremer have been awarded the coveted prize "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty." “Yes. It was very early in the morning. I’m not an early morning person. I figured it would be assault to the system if I don't continue my sleep,” Banerjee said in an interview with NobelPrize.Org. He said that he couldn’t get much sleep later as news of the honour spread from India to Europe and he started getting calls.
When asked about the rare honour for Banerjee and Duflo to be awarded the Nobel as a married couple, he termed it “special”. Only five other married couples have won the Nobel together in the prize’s history. “It’s sort of been an entire family enterprise in the sense between JPAL and the research and working at MIT. There’s lots of dimensions of the work that just becomes much more pleasant when you do it with your partner.” “I was quite taken aback after my name was announced. Never thought, I would get it so early. I thought I would be getting it after at least 10 years... “We have been working on the subject for the last twenty years. We tried offering solutions towards alleviation of poverty,” Banerjee said.
Abhijit joins list of Indian, Indian-origin Nobel Laureates
STOCKHOLM :
INDIAN-AMERICAN Abhijit Banerjee on Monday won the Nobel Prize for Economics, joining the list of Indians and people of Indian origin to grab the world’s most prestigious award in different fields. Born in Mumbai, the 58-year-old economist is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the US-based Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He studied at the University of Calcutta and Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University before receiving his PhD in 1988 from Harvard University.
Banerjee joins list of Indians and people of Indian origin who have received the prestigious Nobel prize in fields like Physics, Chemistry, Peace, Economic Sciences and Medicine. Rabindranath Tagore was the first Indian to win the coveted prize for Literature in 1913 “because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West”. C V Raman won the prize for Physics in 1930 “for his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the effect named after him.”Indian-American Har Gobind Khorana won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1968 along with two others for their “interpretation of the genetic code and its function in protein synthesis.” Mother Teresa, a Roman Catholic nun of Albanian origin and Indian citizenship who founded ‘The Missionaries of Charity’ was awarded the Peace Nobel in 1979 in recognition of her “work in bringing help to suffering humanity”.
Indian-American Subramanyan Chandrasekhar won the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics with William A. Fowler for “theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars.” The Nobel for Economic Sciences in 1998 was won by Kolkata-born economist Amartya Sen “for his contributions to welfare economics.” India-born Venkatraman Ramakrishnan won the 2009 Nobel Prize along with two others in Chemistry “for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome.” 60-year-old Kailash Satyarthi shared the Nobel Peace prize for 2014 with Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai for “their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education”.