Post Object | whileyouweresleeping: This is Esther Duflo. She...

whileyouweresleeping:

This is Esther Duflo. She was one of the speakers at TED 2010.
Esther Duflo is 37. She’s French, and a former girl-scout. Now, she’s a professor at MIT and she specializes in development economics, which is code for “how do we help the poor.”
By her own admission, she’s a bleeding heart, and she’s often been described as a pragmatic idealist. Her whole deal is trying to figure out what efforts and programs actually work, and help ward off poverty in countries like India, Kenya and Chile, among many others. She does this on a small scale, very meticulously carrying out experiments with test and control groups, like they do for drugs. It’s called randomization.
She’s not your run-of-the-mill academic. She’s a badass. Last year, she won the John Bates Clark medal, which is basically the last step before the Nobel Prize in economics. It was the first time a development economist was awarded this medal.
Thanks to friend Jenn, I had the great honor of talking to her about a month ago, in an interview for Annual Reviews. Go listen and find out more.
— From SF.

This is Esther Duflo. She was one of the speakers at TED 2010.

Esther Duflo is 37. She’s French, and a former girl-scout. Now, she’s a professor at MIT and she specializes in development economics, which is code for “how do we help the poor.”

By her own admission, she’s a bleeding heart, and she’s often been described as a pragmatic idealist. Her whole deal is trying to figure out what efforts and programs actually work, and help ward off poverty in countries like India, Kenya and Chile, among many others. She does this on a small scale, very meticulously carrying out experiments with test and control groups, like they do for drugs. It’s called randomization.

She’s not your run-of-the-mill academic. She’s a badass. Last year, she won the John Bates Clark medal, which is basically the last step before the Nobel Prize in economics. It was the first time a development economist was awarded this medal.

Thanks to friend Jenn, I had the great honor of talking to her about a month ago, in an interview for Annual Reviews. Go listen and find out more.

— From SF.