Esther Duflo Speaks on Poverty Research
Susan notes: Thanks to TED for making TED Talks downloadable and embeddable, and for providing the biographical information that goes along with them.
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 takes economics out of the lab and into the field to discover the causes of poverty and means to eradicate it.
2009 MacArthur fellow Esther Duflo is pushing the field of development economics by studying specific causal relationships that lead to or perpetuate poverty. She looks at close-to-home issues: household behavior, education, access to finance and health.