Opinion | A fine balance to use science tools in economics

Abhijit Banerjee’s Nobel Prize for Economics, along with Esther Duflo of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Michael Kremer of Harvard University, has been a long time coming. The beauty of the work done by Banerjee and team over the last many years lies in dealing with uncertainty to perfect this balance, and effectively applying the rigour of scientific experimentation to the social sciences to develop deep insights into this century’s “wicked problem” of poverty. Scholars like Angus Deaton at Princeton University argue that any dilution of the scientific method for the field of social science rendered the conclusions questionable. J-PAL’s South Asia operations have been active in India since 2007 and its 150 researchers and 1,000 field surveyors share some of the credit for Banerjee and team’s contributions to alleviating poverty in the world.