Esther Duflo (born October 25, 1972) is a French economist, currently the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is also co-founder of the Jameel Poverty Action Lab, and in 2009 was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, otherwise known as a "genius" grant.
Alleviating poverty is more guesswork than science, and lack of data on aid's impact raises questions about how to provide it. But Clark Medal-winner Esther Duflo says it's possible to know which development efforts help and which hurt -- by testing solutions with randomized trials.
Esther Duflo (MIT) gives the 15th Barcelona Economics lecture of the Barcelona GSE Research Network on January 14, 2009. The talk is titled "Fighting Poverty Effectively: Creating Experimentation in Development Economics".
Unlike traditional economists who test new aid products under laboratory conditions, Duflo, who just won a MacArthur "genius" grant and has been hailed as "the new face of French intellectualism," tests products in the field, with all the interference and compounding data points that go with it. She has turned her methods on the questions of whether it's best to give away or sell mosquito nets, whether grandfathers or grandmothers are more likely to spend on the health of their families, and what incentives work for vaccination.
Esther Duflo, MIT economist and co-founder of the Poverty Action Lab, asks why the world’s poorest people tend to stay poor. Duflo’s pioneering research applies randomized trials, used extensively in drug discovery research, to development economics. What she discovers are strategies for transforming current approaches to development policy.
Ms. Duflo, whose work has placed her among the year's top picks for lifetime tenured positions, says she ultimately wants to find out why the world's poorest people almost always stay poor. That quest has led her to ask how governments and outside organizations can best help the citizens of poor countries, and why information and technology that can promote economic advancement spread less quickly in some settings than in others.
As founder and publisher of Skeptic Magazine, Michael Shermer has exposed fallacies behind intelligent design, 9/11 conspiracies, the low-carb craze, alien sightings and other popular beliefs and paranoias. But it's not about debunking for debunking's sake. Shermer defends the notion that we can understand our world better only by matching good theory...
Jake Shimabukuro (born November 3, 1976 in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi) is a ukulele virtuoso known for his complex finger work[original research. His music combines elements of jazz, rock, and pop.
Daniel Kahneman (born 5 March 1934) is an Israeli psychologist and Nobel laureate, notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, behavioral economics and hedonic psychology. In 2002, Kahneman received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics (officially titled The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel...
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