Abhijit Banerjee

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.

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

If the BJP government, like the Congress party, had asked what were the numbers on the fraction of people under a particular income, would I have not told them the truth? I would have told them exactly. I would have been as willing.

Investors don't like being in a world where everything is held up by and waiting for an approval from a very small number of people.

I have learnt an enormous amount from talking to people on the ground.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt eventually became the greatest liberal leader of 20th century United States, but he started as a fiscal conservative. His greatness is founded in his willingness to change his mind to save his country from the Great Depression.

We might think we are very different from Pakistan but we are not; we are the same people, with the same capacity for warmth and passion and intolerance and violence.

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 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.

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.

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.

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