Economics Nobel Celebrates Asking the Right Questions
An ‘experimental approach to alleviating global poverty’ is controversial, but it’s also incredibly valuable to leaders in developing countries.
Revolutionizing how we think about global poverty.
Photographer: Sajjad Hussain/AFP/Getty Images
There was a time when development economists struggled to win Nobel Prizes. I was at college in New Delhi when Amartya Sen received the award in 1998 and the reaction was electric: Sen was the first development economist to win in my lifetime, and certainly the first who had spent a career thinking about welfare and poverty. That award was one of the reasons I stuck to economics after graduating.
Unfortunately, the development economics of the late 1990s and early 2000s proved to be considerably less electrifying than I’d hoped. For one thing, you were never sure if it could inform real-world policy in countries such as India.