My twitter is full of people, and fairly progressive Indians, celebrating Abhijit Bannerjee’s Economics “Nobel”. And drawing back to his education at institutions, especially my alma mater JNU, that are being attacked and demonized by the current government. So a few thoughts.
People who graduate from JNU, and especially economists, contrary to popular perception go on to do great things by all accounts. This is not necessarily one of those instances. And yeah it is definitely great political ammunition and should be used as such.
But an uncritical celebration of his and the work of the other recipients is in direct contradiction of the traditions of the institutions like JNU being celebrated.
The 2019 winners’ work is v problematic and has played a crucial role in transforming the discipline of Dev Econ from one that considers the structural causes of underdevelopment & poverty into one that looks mainly at individual incentives & behaviors as it’s causes & solutions
This thread succinctly summarizes why we should be more skeptical of the work of the recipients of the Economics “Nobel”
Here is a great example of results of this approach. In this interview, he is opposed to policies of affirmative action. Affirmative action actively recognizes the structural causes of the lack of access of certain groups to education, jobs, etc. business-standard.com/article/econom…
But under the RCT approach, it is individual behavior and incentives that are the key causes behind the failure of large number of people from underprivileged groups, a policy that is based on structural factors is usually automatically considered problematic.
Similarly, a consideration of farm loan waivers should never be considered without the context of the agricultural crisis in India since the 1990s. But a focus on incentives automatically problematizes these policies because it “distorts” individual incentives
We NEED to talk about the lack of industrial policy, and agricultural crises, and trade policy and how that affects outcomes. Evidence based policy DOES NOT AND SHOULD NOT only mean RCT informed policy. Development and poverty alleviation depends on that.
People who do not have jobs, decent instituons, and access to educations cannot “budget” their way out of poverty. Better cultural beliefs that facilitate better marginal decisions cannot and is not enough to alleviate people out of generational poverty.
At the same time this is freaking absurd and the BJP is trash.
