Nobel Prize Winning Economist Esther Duflo: You Have No Reason to Fear Low-Skilled Migration

So are you an economist because you want to change the world? That's why I became an economist in fact. I was an undergraduate student in history and I only decided to do economics when I realized that economists have this wonderful position in the world which is they can take the time to study problems deeply and come to conclusions but when they are ready to say something they can talk to policymakers and I thought wow this is a great job. That's the job we want to have and so I did come to economics only when I realized that economics could change the world. Hello and welcome to Ways to Change the World. I'm Krishnagiri Murthy and this is the podcast in which we talk to extraordinary people about the big ideas in their lives and the events that have helped shape them. My guest today is a Nobel Prize winner. I can't often say that but Esther Duflo together with her Abhijit Banerjee and colleague Michael Cramer won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2019 for their work on poverty really but she's also with her partner the author of a new book called Good Economics for Hard Times. So we should start with what is good and bad economics I guess because at the moment economists have a very bad reputation in Britain. They are blamed routinely by our leading politicians for getting things wrong so people in the highest positions of the land are going around basically giving economics a bad name. So what is bad economics? Yes it's right economists are a very bad rep right now and it's not just from the highest level of the land it's also everybody else pretty much. There was a YouGov poll in the UK in 2017 that showed that the only people who are least trusted in economics are politicians. I think we should take on a big part of the blame as a profession because bad economics is economics that's kind of driven by ideology and that ignores the fact. I mean because you know economics and politics go together and all big political ideas have to be driven by some sort of economic ballast in the world we live in and that's why I think people are so angry with economics because things seem to have gone wrong. And it's it's also why we decided to write this book because most of the issues that really animate the world today people talk you know are worried about immigration people are worried about trade people are worried about climate change those are issues that have a lot of you know economics in them and economics is too important to be left just to economists but on the other hand economists have a few things to say maybe some light to to shed on these issues and a lot of the best economics is a little bit silent it's not very strident it takes place in offices and it's more subtle and much less ideological than you might think. Because economics is often used by politicians to be proof exactly to be factual. What is economics? What is economics? Economics is the study of how people react to the economic environment around them what makes them tick or what is important to them. So it's very much a social science it's a social science that's kind of has its own approach but it's very much inspired by the other social sciences. The problem is that for a lot of the history of economics it's been dominated by big idea and theory without as much maybe attention on the facts. And some economists think that a theory is always better than a fact and if the facts don't accord to the theory then we should change the facts. And I think this has very much been changing over the last 20 years but I think this change has not yet been communicated to the broader public or to politicians. So are you an economist because you want to change the world? That's why I became an economist in fact. I was an undergraduate student in history and I only decided to do economics when I realized that economists have this wonderful position in the world which is they can take the time to study problems deeply and come to conclusions but when they are ready to say something they can talk to policymakers. And I thought wow this is a great job that's what we want to have. And so I did come to economics only when I realized that economics could change the world. And yet you're not you're not a political economist you know you don't hang out with politicians and write their policies for them. Why not? You know is that something you intend to do if you've done this to change the world? Well to some extent I am actually involved in policy. Maybe not at the level of you know the talking head of parties but very much at the level at which policy is being made every single day in the offices of civil servants and around the mayor's offices in cities and some such. This is where the real policies are happening. So how does that work? Just explain. So a few about 15 years ago we started with Abhijit Banerjee an organization called J-BAL or the Poverty Action Lab and so with emphasis maybe on action where the idea is that when you have good insights so first of all we're working on evaluating what works and what doesn't work in the policies that help the poor and doing that as rigorously as possible with the same rigor as you evaluate the effect of a drug in fact with the same methods and then once you have a result the reason we created Poverty Action Lab is to talk to policymakers to go and say look here is something you could do and I think this is what you need to be as an economist you don't need to to be kind of in love with your own views you need to be pragmatic and look for solutions. Do you think it is possible to solve the problem of human poverty? Not only it is possible but we have already made considerable progress in the last 30 years so in an international context where there are many reasons to get depressed about the world the fight against poverty since the 1990s is really a bright spot and you can see it is a number of extremely poor people which has been halved. You can see it in infant mortality which has been halved as well, maternal mortality which has drastically reduced, the number of deaths from malaria which have also plummeted, even the death from HIV, the number of kids who go to school. So any of these indicators you look at them and they are getting better and I think that's a testimony to the fact that some countries grow fast like China and India but not because even in countries that remain quite poor like Malawi for example it remained quite poor GDP didn't go up the quality of the lives of the poor has nonetheless improved because of the policy focus on these issues of human welfare and because of a bigger willingness to listen to the evidence and be a bit pragmatic in the way they conduct policy. So that I mean there's a little phrase in your answer there that's really really important isn't it which is that even though GDP didn't go up. So you're saying you can solve poverty in a country without assuming that the answer is economic growth. So in extremely poor countries it is very clear that economic growth would lift people out of poverty and the economic growth is desirable in those countries but it is kind of not always necessary and not always sufficient as soon as you move away from the desperation stage in a way because take countries with very different GDP. In rich countries Norway and the US have a very similar GDP like Norway and the US or Sri Lanka and Guatemala to take poorer countries their human welfare outcomes are very different. The child mortality is much lower in Norway than what it is in the US. The child mortality in Sri Lanka is almost at the level of the US despite the fact that it is much poorer economy and it's much much much much much better than what it is in Sri Lanka. So GDP is not the end it's a means to an end and in particular when countries start when growth in countries slows for a reason or another often it's outside a little bit of the control of the local politician because it's hard to know what kind of policies are going to change growth. But on the other hand what is in the control of politicians is a focus on human welfare and they can usually do it. It's not so much increasing the resources but in spending these resources better. So redistributing it? Not only redistributing it even if you keep the budget constant using the same budget in a better way. I suppose I should also say when you talk about GDP are you talking about GDP per head? GDP per head. Because people might say Norway and America but how can they have GDP per head? Why don't countries just copy each other? So why don't poor countries with large populations just say we will do what China did and why doesn't it work that way? Because what is it that China did? You know there is not one China. What should you do to grow very fast? Should you start dirt poor and completely destroyed by cultural revolution and then put some economic sense in it? Should you embrace market reforms? Should you have industrial policy? You know there is not one China. There is any number of things that China did which together contributed to what China is today and it's impossible to isolate any element of the success of China and say I'm going to copy that. In fact in a sense you keep wondering and economists keep arguing of that is did China succeed because of the state ownership of banks or despite the state ownership of banks? You would find economists arguing on both sides of this position. So it's not very productive for people to think I'm going to do the same thing as China. What they could think is I want to emulate China. I want to do as well as China. I want to have a population that is as well educated as China as an objective. That's great you know but they are going to find their own ways to get there and the only way that they are going to find their own ways to get there is to experiment with policies and see what works, what doesn't work for them and move from there and that kind of pragmatic mindset is what will make them make progress not just you know fighting for the China America. So when you say it is possible to solve world poverty I mean do you think what is the gap between the possibility and doing it? So first of all again we've already made progress so that's a good thing. The sustainable development goal called for the eradication of global poverty in 2030. That's ambitious and that will to some extent depend on whether there is a global economic crisis or not but it's not out of the realm of possibility. So what stands in the way is just you know we could I think we could learn even faster. There could be more sharing of the knowledge across country, more experimentation, less policy based on intuition formed in capital and more based on the knowledge of reality in the ground and then we would make even more progress. Because I mean in this book what is what do you mean by hard times? The hard times are the times we are experiencing today particularly in societies in the west which are very much like the Dickensian you know industrial revolution time periods of disruption where at some level there is you know great changes that are happening in society which turned us into the modern societies we are today for the industrial revolution but not without enormous amount of pains and suffering for the people who were sort of sacrificed on this altar. And to some extent we are living similar moments where there is a lot of disruption in people's economic lives due to international trade, due to automation and we seem to have not really learned since Dickensian times the ways that we need to we can and we ought to help people dealing with this transition. We seem to be just as in Dickensian time we think to believe that if someone is hurt by an economic shock say they lose their job in an industrial city in the north of England that's their problem if they don't pick up and move somewhere else. And that's just not true because it is so difficult these transitions are so painful both for economic reasons, for psychological reasons and for sociological reasons that people aren't unable aren't able to do them without help. And as in Victorian time we consider that the poor were a priori suspicious of being lazy and they needed to be punished for needing help. Today we are also very much operating under the same model. That there will be victims and that's just life. And not only that but it's kind of your fault if you don't pick up and go that okay you lost your job but there are other opportunities you were doing you know you were making furniture somewhere you can go sell furniture somewhere else and if you're not doing it somehow it's your own feeling. And I think people it's just like a complete misunderstanding of of of economics. Why? Just explain why. Because it is not true that people the economy is very sticky. People are stuck in place not because they are lazy or lack imagination but because of material factor. For example it's very difficult to move when your child care depends on your extended family because there is no child care provided by the state that you can rely on. When the housing cost in the city where the jobs are is so incredibly expensive. When you have a mortgage of your house and you're completely under it because the house's prices are collapsed where you are. So how are you going to move? It is not easy it is quite difficult maybe impossible that's the first thing purely economically difficult. The second thing is I think economists really what makes economics model tick often and this idea that people would move and take advantage of opportunities is is the idea that people are very sensitive to financial incentive and that's what they are the most sensitive about. That okay if I see that I've lost my job there is another one I'm going to move and I'm going to take advantage of it. But in fact it's not like that because there are many other things that people care about. They care about dignity, they want to derive a sense of purpose from their work, they want to at their scale they all want we all want to change the world. That can be our local world but so we we derive meaning in our existence from a job well done in a sense and a job that is meaningful. That is true for me, that is true for you, that is true for the furniture maker. And when suppose you've been doing this job for like 20 years and you've become foreman and the company goes away. What even if you could have a job selling furniture as an entry level position or being the security guard in a furniture shop that's not giving you back your dignity. That might give you back some way of earning a living but it's not giving you back your status in life. And how can we not take into account the fact that it's a huge cost, it's a real cost. It's not in terms of money but it's in terms of what makes us human. And then related to that is what people also deeply care about is their having friends and relationship and status in community. There is a huge epidemic of loneliness in western societies which is actually catching up even in middle income country like India. People are incredibly lonely. And to again go back, someone is well installed in their community making furniture and then the job goes and they are supposed to go all alone and start again from scratch. How is that not a huge cost? And economists have not paid enough attention to this huge cost. They think about people will adjust and at the margin of course they might not do just as well but almost and life will go on. It has also percolated I think among politicians that that's mostly first order what's going to happen and we just need to pick up the slack. And that is wrong. That is not a good understanding of how people behave. I mean it's understandable though that these ideas take hold though isn't it because we live also in a world of mobility and immigration and this is at the heart of the debate as well because people also see migrants coming to the country and doing precisely what you said you know we don't want to do you know which is to move and to start from scratch and to take a low-paid job and build a new life. Some people do this and in fact also some people who lose their furniture job also do this but it's actually a minority. What is very surprising with migration flows is not how high they are it's how low they are given the difference in the standard of living. Even if you take for example the European Union where there is free mobility anybody can go anywhere even in the face of huge shocks like the Greek crisis Greeks mostly stayed where they were. So some people do move and these people tend to be super enterprising and detect jobs that nobody wants to take and it is not a surprise that as a result a lot of the entrepreneurs successful entrepreneurs are migrants or children of migrants because they are the type of people who choose to kind of pick up and make a living but it is actually a minority of people so we cannot count on everybody to have this entrepreneurial spirit in them some do some don't you know we have to make a society that works for the majority of people not the extremely motivated ones. But one of the ideas that you've taken on in this book is the idea that immigrants lower wages which is one that you know the Labour Party argues and says you know there are you know there are there are downsides to migration and you know you've got to make sure that the labour market isn't you know isn't deflated and and we need to we need political intervention to stop. You're saying that doesn't happen. Yes so actually all the research on the vast majority of the research and there has been study after study after study of migration there was a report from the National Academy of Science in the US that summarized maybe hundreds of studies and they all come to the conclusion that the effect of low-skilled migration on low-skilled wages is zero. So in other words zero it's not just that it's small it's zero it's zero and you have even when you have big waves of migrants for example when Cubans came to Miami in big wave when Castro gave them the green light for a short period of time you had a huge wave of Cuban migrants and David Card a labour economist at Berkeley studied this episode and looked what happens to the wage of the low-skilled people in Miami compared to any other similar cities opposite in the in the 1960s there was already a lot of protest against migrants etc and so there was a finally Kennedy decided to send back home all of the temporary migrants that were working on farms in California. What happened to wages? Nothing. So we discussed this evidence in the book and we do realize that it kind of goes against the grain because you're thinking very simply more people lower wages that make sense so we also go the next step and say well why is that basic economic logic failing and there are many reasons for that one is that when migrants come in they have to eat they consume and actually the demand for low-skilled labour also goes up so that helps so that counteracts any negative effect the other is that migrants do not directly compete for native because the native workers are already esconded in their relationship most labour market relationship are very much ones of networks and of trust etc and the low-skilled migrant have access to none of that so they are not really competing in the same market the only thing they can do is take the job that nobody wants and so by taking the job that nobody wants they suddenly make some services available for cheaper that were available before so that actually frees up some native worker to work for example you now have gardeners and people who pick up your trash and you have much cheaper restaurants and things like that so the high-skilled women who were before had to stay home to take care of their kids and their family can go to work and when they go to work they hire and that also contributes to create employment for the native worker also what happened in the case of the farmers in california is that when the migrant got sent home the farmers mechanized they didn't replace the migrant by native worker because they knew the native worker wouldn't take the job they just mechanized so again another reason why migrants we try to go through this to say don't just take a word for it first of all this is what the evidence shows across a variety of contexts and second of all these are the reasons why you have no reason to to fear low-skilled migration and it's not therefore really a moral argument it's not i should be for migration because i'm a good person despite the fact that it's going to hurt it will be low people make impact it's going to be rather small but this is a very well rehearsed argument in this country now and and when people hear that argument they often say ah but what's about the impact on services on school places on you know how easy it is to get an appointment in my hospital or doctor's clinic you have to factor that in as well and you also have to factor in i suppose by your own argument how people feel yes about migrants absolutely so on the on the farmer so that's another issue it's this do migrant cause congestions in the in the in the social services but that's something which is much more solvable it seems to me because we could uh we could in principle increase the budget of these services so that there is no congestion and it would have the added benefit that it would create jobs for native worker mostly because it's the migrant that are going to teach the extra kids it's people who already have an education so so this could be solved by policy and it would make perfect sense if you have more people coming in to uh to um increase the services in in parallel that said we should keep in mind that migrants as we were saying international migrants are like very much like internal migrant they are not that many of them so it is not that there is a flood you know that we would be opening the floodgates and we would be taken over by migrants in any case if even in settings like the European Union where the migration barriers are very limited there are no massive flows anyway so it's not that you suddenly get like the entire hospital service needing to be multiplied by 10 that's not there it might be a small increase in demand which should be matched by an increase in supply the perception part is absolutely critical and um i'm not a politician i i i'm not very good at packaging messages uh all i can do as an economist is to put the fact out there hope that the politician reads it um and think about a way to to package it to move the conversation away from kind of a non-factual terrain to a factual turn to make people happier about to make people understand that or less scared about migration now another part of the migration fight is the identity fight where people feel um it's not just about jobs or in particular in the U.S. the way that the debate has been playing out is not so much in terms of they are taking our jobs but they are you know raping our girls and they are criminals and and and they are a lot of people who are the most scared of migration are people who have never seen a migrant in their life because they live at the other end of the U.S. and they have never seen a Mexican migrant and they are the ones who are the most scared that rhetoric is like deeply noxious um it's very um i don't have a good answer of how we fight that rhetoric all i know is that we need to work on it and we really need to put our points together and saying how do you fight that rhetoric of the immigrant threatening uh our very existence are you saying economically there is actually an argument for relaxing our immigration or increasing our immigration western development yes economically we can relaxing is a good term we could be quite relaxed about it it wouldn't create an invasion because everyone assumes that if you had suppose you just have free movement we'll take anybody yeah the assumption here is that we would be flooded with africans and asians and that's actually not the case how do you know we know because we are not flooded by greeks and we were not flooded by greeks when they were really ultra poor people prefer to stay home we know because if you look at india people stay in the rural area and don't move to the city i mean some of them too but many do not move to the city despite huge difference in lifestyle so this is again the same thing that we kind of live under the idea that all our life is so much better than and then there are they will want to come in fact the people who are the most pro-migration make the argument as well to say oh if only we opened the borders people would move and there would be so much pressure here that's wrong too it's not they wouldn't they mostly they wouldn't okay let's move on from immigration but the other big issue obviously that we must talk about because we're in an election period in this country is tax that is the great argument going on in this country at the moment you know do you know that the choices are between a party that wants to increase taxes on the wealthier people in the country and redistribute to some degree and a party that says it's a low tax party and that that's the way to stimulate economic growth and make everybody better off what does your evidence tell you what's the argument you're so on this one we actually have a lot of evidence that you know lowering taxes has never stimulated economic growth that people are not particularly sensitive to tax incentives so they don't stop working when taxes are higher and they don't work more when taxes are lower that's true for the very rich and that's true actually for everyone else so the idea that the rich would all the idea they would they would all stop working that they would stop working is like preposterous or go and live in switzerland so about the living in switzerland is uh is a more delicate issue in europe clearly the problem of tax evasion and tax shopping is one that anybody who wants to increase taxes has to recon with and uh there has there is no coordination between tax policies in european countries and that's unfortunate because it is always people will know will evade uh that is that might happen but they will not stop working but is it true that lower taxes put more money in people's pocket it puts more money in people's pocket but it's it it doesn't the fact that they have more money in their pocket doesn't convince them that they should work harder there was a very interesting episode in switzerland where they moved from one tax system to another tax system the technical detail doesn't matter but when they did that the only way to do that was to give people a two-year tax holiday so for two years uh they knew that they were going to pay zero taxes and that happened in different contents at different times so you can look at in the contents that has the tax holiday are people working more they should because they know it's only for two years they should work to the maximum extent possible and you know save the effect is zero there is absolutely zero increase in work effort uh during the tax holiday or in reported income for that matter so the and that's just one piece of evidence it happens to be very straightforward and very clear but it's one of again dozens and dozens dozens of studies that show that if you reduce taxes people don't work don't work more if you increase taxes they don't work less but what is the impact of tax collecting you see one of the examples in this country is that when the government lowered the top rate of tax uh from 50 percent they increased the amount coming into the extra uh so there is uh so this is separated in two things one is the actual real effort and the other is collection so my argument was about the actual real effort which at some level is what we should care about because that's what makes the economy ticks but also we obviously we also care about evasion and loopholes and and you couldn't increase taxes without uh being as systematic as possible to uh to fix the loophole in fact when you compare the effect of tax reforms on tax revenues across countries which have very simple broad-based tax systems which leaves almost no scope for evasion you see that in those countries the the effect of if you increase taxes you get more revenue and that's about it in uh countries which have a lot of blue hole that effect is lower because a lot of the money gets moved around etc but even that money eventually somehow people need to get back i think it would be necessary on top of thinking about um increasing the top tax rates it would obviously be necessary to think about fixing the tax loophole uh regulating the fiscal heavens and some coordination across the countries in europe but all of that has are technical issues we can solve them the underlying human behavior that if you tax more you work less that's just not true so the idea that if if we raised taxes we would end up stifling growth in some way and there would be less money coming into the government and then as a country we would have less money to spend that's just not true that's voodoo economy that's just so totally debunked that uh it's not even funny concept so why is it such a dominant idea you know it's just politics is it rather than we we we discussed we discussed it in the book because uh when trump did tax reforms some economists there was a huge consensus among economists that it would not stimulate growth in a in in a way that would pay for itself which is what the trump administration was arguing and there is a pool of top economists who answer questions every month and they all seem to agree that that it would not stimulate course in this way so i'm not being revolutionary here i am like basically representing the consensus of the broad profession there were still some kind of old-fashioned old guard economists who took it took it upon themselves to sign a letter saying oh it might be there might be an increase in growth and i i was i must say i was quite amazed by that i was like why would you stick your stick your neck out to say something that's just not true and you're going to be proven wrong in like three years and you're going to look so stupid and i think there are two reasons for that and there are also two reasons why um politicians still get away with making such claims and trump got away with making these claims and now the conservative are trying to get away with making these claims and the the the main reason is that economists have repeated for so long you know since you know milton friedman and ronald reagan and margaret thatcher that it kind of has a bit of a tone of a lullaby or mantra we used to say oh yes doesn't that make sense and the second one is that again goes with our view that um that is quite widely shared that people are very sensitive to financial incentive so we did a funny little experiment for this book which is we interviewed 10 000 people online and more or less representative of the american public and half of them we asked them questions about themselves so suppose that taxes increased would you stop working would you work less would your spouse work less would you move would you um do any would you try to cheat on your taxes and the other half we asked uh if there was increase in taxes would other people move work less etc and about themselves people said no then they wouldn't move they wouldn't actually move state is the one thing that they said they would do to some extent but they wouldn't stop working their spouse would continue to work um but when asked about other people they think other people would do it so i think we we think that other people are sensitive to this tax incentive so that makes people very reluctant to think about increasing taxes because they are worried that they would kind of be the stupid fool if they are the one who continue to work and everybody else is lacking i think we need to be maybe make people aware that actually everybody's like them and so so you do think that there is such a thing as economic consensus like scientific consensus around climate change or terrorism because if you take something like brexit there are you know some key economists um who are the ones who sort of buck the trend and say no you know britain could grow its economy and do incredibly well and thrive after after even a you know a very hard brexit or no deal brexit or whatever it might be and it's a it's a dilemma for journalists and ordinary people because you kind of have to go how much weight do you have to give them so i think the consensus really depends on the issue uh on so this um poll of economists that's organized by the university of chicago business school it's kind of useful to see where people stand where academic economists stand at any given point in time and that could be a useful tool to see where the consensus of the profession is on some issues of people there is a lot of consensus for example when there was the trade the president trump started threatening increasing tariff a question was posed to economists and the universal agreement that tariffs would not increase the welfare of the american people which is completely at odd with what most people what the american people think but so that's it so on but at least there is a consensus on the economy standard on other issues there is no consensus uh people disagree and i think those are often issues where um the facts are not very well established for example on automation there is much less consensus among economists some some economists think that automation will displace jobs in a way that they are not going to be replaced and some people think that oh it's going to be like the industrial revolution eventually it will all fall into place and i think the reason why there is no consensus in this place is that we don't have all of the elements so how much do you feel you know i mean could you design a country now could you could you you know if you were given a country do you feel you would know what to do to make it thrive no uh i think there is so much that is uh uh so much that is you know out of the control of of of the best of policymakers maybe if you if you gave me a small city i could not make it you know paradise but i would have maybe i would have an idea of how to do it a whole country i think in a sense and that's true for anybody who claim that they could they that they could for sure fix a country is fooling themselves or fooling the voters i mean everybody politicians uh economists they have to do the best with what they have knowing that there is a ton that's not in their control what they can do is you know pick some issues where they can make progress we normally spend quite a lot of this conversation talking about people's lives and we haven't talked about your life so it's about the issues and the subject but i mean um just just just to briefly look at that i mean where did it where did your love for economics come from you know were you brought up with it or is it just something you were good at or i had no love for economics whatsoever in fact it didn't you know growing up would never occur to me that i would become an economist i for whatever reason from the age of eight i thought i would be a historian and i studied history as an undergraduate but also from about that age i i i was very uh i was an activist in in my own ways you know i was kind of very keen that i should do something about about poverty i had a lot of exposure to it because my um my mom and my uncles were both active in active in ngos that helped with kids victim of wars so they were traveling to these countries and coming back and talking to us about it so i had kind of always this view of like what's my responsibility there is there you know how come i was born in a middle class family in france and some kids have to walk five kilometers to get water that doesn't seem right and i had a bit of a crisis of uh you know vocation of what am i going to do so i decided that i was going to take one year off and go to russia for one year and um i got the opportunity there to to work for um and i saw that they could uh you know that their day job was potentially about changing the world um this was just at the beginning of the economic transition in in russia uh in 93 94 is when i spent a year there and it was a very difficult period for russia just after the collapse russia wasn't feeling it was trying to feel his way into the new system you had queues of people you know um impoverished people trying to sell a little bit of something it was quite a crazy time and i saw economists being you know very much in the conversation i didn't necessarily agree with what they had to say but i could see that wow this is like an amazing job and i also met at the same time thomas picketty who at the time was an assistant professor in economics at mit and he said oh you you you're interested in practical things uh you think economics is too abstract that's why you've not liked it till then which was very much true but if you go to mit you will see they will teach you how to really look at data in a very good way and you should do that so the combination of this you know finding out about how economics could be pragmatic and how it was taught in the us to be pragmatic and uh seeing economics in action that's why i decided okay great this is this is what i should do because i will be able to carry out my passion which is improving the lot of the poorest people in the world as part of my day job and not as what i do when i come home what's it like working with your partner when you say when you come home you come home you come home with your partner i mean yes now it's fine we are doing it all the time uh it's great it's uh you know we are both equally uh passionate about um about the work we do and uh often when you are in the office there is so many distractions you are not actually doing your work you are doing some other things and uh when we come home we've been on the way home we can start actually talk about economics and about our projects and uh of course we also love many other things um a bit it loves cooking you know like being a sous chef and we have delightful kids and we like to watch cinema and but then we also know that we are really passionate and interested in the same thing and we share values and what difference does winning a nobel prize mean i don't know yet this is a different from any other prize in the sense that it is so public so it puts you in the spotlight in the way that we've never been before and on a pedestal and on a pedestal but the spotlight is in a sense what we need to we can kick out the pedestrians and and use the spotlight we really we are kind of still discovering uh what this makes possible but we really want to use it to further the movements what we keep saying with both abhijit and me but also michael kramer the third winner is that this prize is not for us it's really for the movement of thinking really seriously about the issues of development thinking at them you know methodically little problem by little problem as scientifically as possible and using this experimental method and that's not something that the three of us did it's something that the three of us may be natural you're only the second woman to win this prize why is that there are very few women in economics so i think that reflects that and it's not just at the very top it's everywhere and there are fewer undergraduate students who choose economics and of them they are less likely to become graduate students and of the graduate students they are less likely to continue in academia and so on and so forth so so that's why and that has improved a little bit so the the fact that i'm a woman is also related to the fact i'm young and there are more young women but um it does not improve nearly as fast as it should and frankly the situation is even worse and i think this is a real problem because economics being in social science really benefits from diversity of viewpoints people are different people are interested in different opinions or different questions and they also see these questions slightly differently until recently the profession was not very aware of it being a problem maybe because we're economists we like let the market be but i think this has changed and i think there is an effort in thinking about what in our in our culture is a bit um off-putting for women we have a slightly macho culture in economics and you know aggressive and it doesn't suit everybody and it's less likely to suit to suit women another reason i think why we have few economics female economists and minority economists is that um people have this perception that economics is about growth rate and interest rate and finance and all that take me i had no interest in economics even though i wanted to to work on poverty it i never put two and two together until i really was directly exposed to the work of economists so in that sense the nobel prize being given to us as development economists not just to not just the fact that i'm a woman but just the topic might help showing to young people look economics is about these issues as well and so if you're worried about climate change economists study that if you're worried about poverty economies do that if you're worried about inequality and mobility and integration and minorities economists do that as well we ask everybody how would you change the world if you could just change them can you give an answer to that i think if i had one answer is that people should start listening to each other and and and looking at the fact as fact without coming with too much preconception because if we could do that then we could really collectively solve pretty much all the problems in the world yes thank you very much indeed