Abhijit Banerjee

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. ”

Like many free market economists, with whom he had little else in common, Nehru seemed to believe that people will find a way to get their children educated. ”

Anyone who has a child knows the importance of not over-playing your hand. He was up all night playing some game on his smartphone and you feel like saying that if it happens again the phone is gone. Forever. Till he is old enough to buy his own. Till then he can have your old Nokia. ”

It is absolute poverty that you could end, but I think relative poverty is a whole other issue. ”

Healthcare expenses often wipe out families. ”

I mean, I think it's a two-way relationship: I think you should not have too much faith in your own rationality. You should not have too much faith in the rationality of, you know, anybody else either. We all learn together about the way the world is, and I think it's a sort of antidote to wishful thinking of all kinds. ”

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

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. ”

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

Climate change is something that we cannot fix alone - it is the original collective action problem - it will not work unless almost all the large economies of the world act together. ”