21 Quotes by Abhijit V. Banerjee

The point is simple: talking about the problems of the world without talking about some accessible solutions is the way to paralysis rather than progress.

For each successful entrepreneur in the Silicon Valley or elsewhere, many have had to fail.

And, perhaps most urgently, how can society help all those people the markets have left behind?

For that, we need to understand what undermines trust in economists. A part of the answer is that there is plenty of bad economics around. Those who represent the “economists” in the public discourse are not usually the same people who are part of the IGM Booth panel.

Herd behavior generates informational cascades: the information on which the first people base their decision will have an outsized influence on what all the others believe.

The government exists in part to solve problems no other institution can realistically tackle. To demonstrate waste in government, one needs to show there is an alternative way of organizing the same activity that works better.

It is easy to forget, especially in a crisis, the need to protect as far as possible the dignity of those being helped.

A combination of unrealistic goals, unnecessarily pessimistic expectations, and the wrong incentives for teachers contributes to ensure that education systems in developing countries fail their two main tasks: giving everyone a sound basic set of skills, and identifying talent.

The answers to these problems take more than a tweet. So there is an urge to just avoid them. And partly as a result, nations are doing very little to solve the most pressing challenges of our time; they continue to feed the anger and the distrust that polarize us, which makes us even more incapable of talking, thinking together, doing something about them. It often feels like a vicious cycle.