Esther Duflo: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. What advice do you give to your talented undergraduates that differs from the advice your colleagues would give them? I give almost all of them the advice to take some time off, in particular if they have any interest in development, which is generally the reason why they come to see me in the first place. But even if they don’t really, to spend a year or two in a developing country, working on a project. Not necessarily inner city. Any project spending time in the field. This is what Michael Kremer did before he went back to graduate school, and I think that was a determinant to him. This, to some extent, is what I did with my little Russia experience. And this was clearly very central to me. It’s only through this exposure that you can learn how wrong most of your intuitions are and preconceptions are. I can tell it to them till they are blue in the face to not let themselves be guided by what seems obvious to them. But until they’ve confronted what they think is obvious to something entirely different, then it’s not clear. Whether or not this is different from what my colleagues would say, I don’t know. Maybe some of my colleague would say that you’re better off staying home and cranking some data and getting these types of skills. Obviously it hasn’t stopped you any, but do you worry that development economics in some ways puts women at a disadvantage because some emerging economies are especially dangerous for women? India, in particular, that may be the case.…

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