Abhijit Banerjee

Students often say things that they will one day change their minds about, but also things that change our minds when we think about them. ”

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. ”

When you compare individuals, rather than countries, you find that education improves both income and the quality of life. ”

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. ”

Most economies have a fair amount of tax evasion, depending on how their data systems are. ”

Jawaharlal Nehru did a huge amount for education in India. ”

The poverty line in the U.S., for example, has nothing to do with the poverty line in India. It is a relative poverty line. It is reset from time to time but it is related to U.S. median income, so if I set that to be the absolute poverty line everyone in India would essentially be poor. ”

Celebrate creativity and confidence in the face of adversity. ”

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. ”

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. ”