When the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to Esther Duflo, PhD ’99, and Abhijit Banerjee, the world got a glimpse of how their passionate dedication to alleviating global poverty has improved the lives of millions of people. Not long after delivering their Nobel lectures in Stockholm, they and co-winner Michael Kremer announced they would donate the prize money to advance research in development economics. Hearing this, I was struck once again by how the spirit of their work and their journey to the Nobel reflect their deepest values, and MIT’s.
Faced with a knot of hard problems—the intertwined challenges of extreme poverty around the world—our newest laureates seized the opportunity to apply their knowledge and achieve tangible results. Taking an experimental, hands-on, very MIT approach, they pioneered the use of randomized controlled trials, or RCTs, to test poverty-fighting theories and programs “on the ground.” By providing a rigorous way to determine which interventions work best and why, they revolutionized both the study and the practice of global development work. One could not ask for a better illustration of MIT’s philosophy of Mind and Hand.
Since cofounding the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) in 2003, Duflo and Banerjee have emphasized broad collaboration—a central theme of life at MIT and of nearly all successful scientific research. They work closely with a network of researchers and organizations carrying out experiments across five continents on a wide range of issues, including teacher absenteeism, child immunization, business development, and food supply chains.
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