Quotes from Abhijit Banerjee

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.

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.

I'm not an early morning person.

Mamata Banerjee and Narendra Modi, the ultimate didi and dada of Indian politics, should really commiserate.

In a world where audiences listen for attitudes rather than arguments or information, speakers must feel the pressure to posture rather than engage.

If democracy is to be an articulation of mutual respect, a leader in a democracy leads by showing respect to all.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If you happen to be mostly depressed about the state of your life, I don't know whether you feel like doing impulse control.

I am not partisan in my economic thinking. We work with any number of state governments, many of which are BJP governments.

The BJP must nurture the institutions that put credible checks and balances in place.

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.

Milk production is one of India's great success stories.

The world's poorest people use the cheapest available fuels - dung and twigs and even leaves.

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.

Insurance is important for protecting the health of people and Ujjwala is quite useful to low-income women.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.