I was an Indian with zero sense of caste till I was 20. That’s an unusual privilege but it came out of the fact that I was a middle-class Bengali. Abhijit Banerjee Read Quote
So, I went to Harvard and I got exposed to American work habits. I didn’t even realise for a while that I was behind. I kind of had the illusion that I was understanding things. But people worked so hard and the thing I learnt first in America was that people work incredibly hard. Abhijit Banerjee Read Quote
Investors don’t like being in a world where everything is held up by and waiting for an approval from a very small number of people. Abhijit Banerjee Read Quote
In terms of being a professional, I want to be professional with everyone. Abhijit Banerjee Read Quote
We are specialists who have something special to say. We have had no problem with working in any state interested in evaluating their policies. Abhijit Banerjee Read Quote
I think it is a very important point for India to create a bureaucracy that lives on the ground and gets its stimulus from how life is on the ground. Abhijit Banerjee Read Quote
We’ve learned a huge amount from organisations like Seva Mandir and Pratham, for example. In my personal experience, these organisations work on a very large scale with very poor people. Abhijit Banerjee Read Quote
Catastrophic health shocks do enormous damage to families both economically and otherwise, and are easy to insure, because nobody gets them on purpose. On the other hand, insurance policies that only treat certain catastrophic illnesses are hard to comprehend, especially of you are illiterate and unused to the legalistic nature of exclusions etc. Abhijit Banerjee Read Quote
When you compare individuals, rather than countries, you find that education improves both income and the quality of life. Abhijit Banerjee Read Quote
