Abhijit Banerjee

My sense of my own superiority over many of my classmates would have been much more muted if I knew that they had seen me failing miserably at woodwork or cross-stitch.

Our democratic culture does not prioritise protecting an individual's right to live life her way, especially if that is not our way or the way of the community.

Celebrate creativity and confidence in the face of adversity.

If you are a natural scientist, a publication the journal Science carries enormous prestige.

To insist that no one can support the interests of the aam aadmi without being one himself is like saying that no man can support women's rights.

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

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.

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.

Public conversations about who we are and who we want to be are key to the vitality of our democracy, and leaders can seed those conversations when they speak out their own views.

One does not have to agree with his views to be intrigued by the possibilities opened up by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's emergence as communicator/harangue-master in chief.

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.

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

If there can be films about why hockey (and not just cricket) is cool, there can be a film or two about the virtues of honest, hard work.

Mass protests often get books or films banned, but very few people take to the streets to challenge the right of the State to decide what we can read or watch - it's still someone else's problem.

Even Milton Friedman - doyen of radical free market thought - was willing to consider some government intervention into primary education on the grounds that it is unfair for children to not get a chance in life because they were born to poor parents.

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.

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).

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.

Policy change is nothing if it's not patient work.

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.

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

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.

One advantage of not being in power is that we can dream of reshaping the world exactly as we please.

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.

We will remember UPA 2, if at all, it seems, as that period when things went mysteriously wrong - for the bribe-taking, buck-passing, foot-dragging, and general sense of paralysis.

The AAP was not the first group of well-meaning outsiders in politics.

People who live inside garbage piles - that should not be happening.

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.

You don't boost growth by cutting taxes, you do that by giving money to people.

You have to take it seriously that the economy is in crisis.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

For me, psychologically, I am very much an Indian.

Here is an entirely banal idea that I think has the potential to change the world: Take evidence seriously. Taking evidence seriously does not mean privileging numbers over all other forms of knowledge - theories, narratives, images. Nor does it mean the kind of radical skepticism that questions everything to the point where no action is possible.

Good intentions and grand theories do not make a good programme. Programmes work best when they're based on a detailed und­er­standing of the problem being solved and how they are implemented on the ground.

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.

The AAP from the beginning made it clear that they were about changing policy and not being a symbol of purity in a corrupt world.

It is undeniable that the looming environmental crisis is partly the consequence of population growth.

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

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.

In the development business doing something for both women and the environment is the equivalent of holding a royal flush in poker.

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

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.

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.

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.

Jawaharlal Nehru did a huge amount for education in India.