Esther Duflo: preference

Transcript context

…But you’re not doing 5x of what you’re doing, right? Something stops you. It could be money. It could be talent. I always try to be behind the money. I think a lot of problems of some centers — sometimes you get some money to do something, and then you have to have the idea to match the money. We always had some idea before, and the money comes. So at some level, the money is always the constraining factor at any point in time. You could say, “Why don’t you get more talent to get more money?” But there are some limits to that. Another thing is, I’m not sure I’m aiming at world conquest in the sense that I’m more interested in — and I think that that very much applied to the three of us — we were very much interested in creating an ecosystem where that kind of work becomes easier because policymakers are interested, funders are interested, talent is interested, and because there are some things that are eased. When we started even the Hyderabad project, we were still learning as we went, and we made mistakes. We’re still making mistakes but fewer now because there is an infrastructure and some learnings. This infrastructure can then be given to other, younger people that have more imaginative great ideas to run with. I’ve always been more interested in doing that and using my own work as a little bit of a testing ground, trying new things that are quite risky because it doesn’t matter to me if that fails. I have tenure. Do you worry much that the RCT method — it centralizes authority in too few institutions? You need a certain amount of money. You need some managerial ability. You need connections abroad. It’s not like running regressions — everyone can do it on their PC. Is that, in some way, going to slow down science? You get more reliable results, but there’s much less competition of ideas, it seems.…

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