4.7 • 4.3K Ratings
🗓️ 11 July 2011
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
0:00.0 | Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts |
0:13.9 | of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org |
0:21.2 | where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to |
0:26.5 | another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd |
0:33.6 | love to hear from you. Today is July 6, 2011, and my guest is Abujiq Banerjee, the Ford Foundation |
0:45.2 | International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He's a founder |
0:50.6 | of J. Powell, the Abdul-Atif Chamele poverty action lab, and he is a member of the consortium |
0:55.5 | on financial systems and poverty at the University of Chicago. His latest book, co-authored with |
1:01.1 | Esther Duflow, is Poor Economics, Abujiq, Welcome to Econ Talk. Thank you. You're critical of what |
1:08.9 | might be called to extreme views of development and aid. One is associated with Jeffrey Sachs, |
1:13.9 | who argues for large top-down approaches from the outside, and one associated with William |
1:19.6 | Easterly, who argues the most aid from the outside is wasted, and that only a bottom-up internal |
1:25.9 | approach will work. What do you see as being incorrect with these two views? Well, not so much |
1:32.6 | the moral with the top-down, as much as the, let's, that we know the answer to the problem, |
1:44.6 | let's just, any answer to the money. I think more often than not, the problem isn't, isn't to |
1:53.0 | be solved by just putting money in the most conventional way, onto the problem. You have to |
2:00.0 | think of why the problem is the way it is. I try to understand it, try different solutions out, |
2:08.4 | do the kind of sentimental work that we do in JPL, try out strategies, and then you get to |
2:16.4 | the answer, but that takes a while, and it takes a lot of care, and so it's really not money or |
2:25.4 | no money. It's money, but money on with intelligence. And you argue that one of the most effective, |
2:34.6 | perhaps the only effective way to get that intelligence is through a recent approach that's been |
2:41.0 | taken, sometimes called RCT, randomized control trials in layman's terms, just running experiments |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Library of Economics and Liberty, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Library of Economics and Liberty and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.