Quotes from Abhijit Banerjee

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.

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.

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.

It is absolute poverty that you could end, but I think relative poverty is a whole other issue.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

If people don't want blue-collar work, our labour costs will remain high and our competitiveness low.

Most farmers know that their children's future will probably not be in agriculture, but they have a hard time imagining a different life.

I think when I say my county, it is always India.

I have always found it difficult to wrap my head around population policies.

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.

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.

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.

Sometimes economists are right, and sometimes economists are wrong.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.