In a public lecture at the University of Zurich, Nobel laureates Esther Duflo (MIT) and Abhijit Banerjee (MIT) offered better answers to our biggest problems.

https://www.ubscenter.uzh.ch/en/news_...

How can we alleviate inequality and poverty? This is the core question that Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo have been addressing for years and the motivation behind their extensive research. Equipped with a broad experience in the field of development economics and the latest scientific findings, they dare to tackle the big questions of our time and are not afraid to bring up uncomfortable topics. Their latest book Good Economics for Hard Times is filled with personal anecdotes and experiences and provides a new perspective of policy debates that are shaping the discourse on today’s most pressing global problems: Immigration and inequality, globalization and technological disruption, slowing growth and accelerating climate change – these are sources of great anxiety across the world, from New Delhi and Dakar to Paris and Washington, DC.
Banerjee and Duflo are strong advocates of interdisciplinary approaches and criticize the economics profession’s obsession with growth, the shortcomings of using financial incentives to influence behavior, or the separation of economics, psychology, and communication. “Economics is too important to be left to economists,” is one of their famous quotes.

Esther Duflo is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). In her research, she seeks to understand the economic lives of the poor, with the aim to help design and evaluate social policies. With Abhijit Banerjee, she wrote Poor Economics - A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty. In 2019, she won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.

Abhijit Banerjee is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2003 he co-founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) with Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan, and he remains one of the Lab’s Directors. Banerjee is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society. He is a winner of the Infosys Prize a co-recipient of the 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for his groundbreaking work in development economics research.

Prof. Duflo and Prof. Banerjee both serve on the UBS Center Advisory Board.

00:00:00 - 00:09:30 Intro Ernst Fehr
00:09:30 - 00:30:00 Keynote Abhijit Banerjee
00:30:00 - 01:02:45 Keynote Esther Duflo
01:02:45 - 01:29:14 Q&A

#EconomicsForSociety #UniversityOfZurich #NobelLecture