Dec 30, 2019
Long before Abhijit Banerjee won the
2019 economics
Nobel with Michael Kremer and
Esther Duflo,
he was a fellow graduate student
at Harvard
with Tyler.
For Tyler, Abhijit
is one of the brightest
economic minds
he’s ever met, and “a brilliant
theorist who decided the future was with empirical
work.”
But according to
Abhijit, theory and
practice go hand in hand:
the real benefit of a randomized control
trial isn’t getting unbiased estimates, he says,
but in testing hypotheses borne out of
theory.
Abhijit joined
Tyler to discuss his unique
approach to economics, including thoughts on
premature deindustrialization, the intrinsic weakness of
any charter
city, where the best classical Indian music is being
made today, why he prefers making Indian sweets to French sweets, the influence of English
intellectual life in India, the history behind Bengali leftism, the best Indian regional
cuisine, why
experimental economics is
underrated,
the reforms he’d make to
traditional graduate
economics training, how his mother’s
passion inspires his research, how many consumer loyalty
programs he’s joined, and
more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.
Recorded December 2nd, 2019
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