Randomised control trials have commonly been used in medical studies. When economists decided to adopt them for social policy, the “randomista movement” was born. This allowed Esther Duflo, along with her husband, Abhijit Banerjee, and Michael Kremer to advance their experimental research on how to alleviate poverty, which led them to win the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics. In her last visit to LSE, Duflo sat down for a Q&A with Charlotte Kelloway for the LSE IQ podcast.
What happened that morning when you found out you’d won the Nobel Prize?
Well, it was actually the middle of the night because we are in Boston. They called us at about three or four in the morning. Of course, when you get a phone call from Europe at three or four in the morning, the first worry is, “oh my god, what is going on with my parents” So it was doubly welcome to hear the news they wanted to share.
When they said, “we want to inform you that you won the Nobel Prize”, my first question was, with whom? When they said with Abhijit Banerjee. I said, “I’ll give him the phone.” Then the president of the Academy of Science told me, “Now you have to get up, shower, get a good cup of tea because at six am you have a press conference.,.” I said, “okay.” Abhijit looked at me and said, “I’m going back to sleep.” I was like, “What? We just won a Nobel Prize!” He told me, “It’s going to be a long day.”
He went back to sleep, and I got up, took a shower, drank some tea and got ready for the press conference. Then the day went by pretty quickly. Immediately after that we got deluged by emails and MIT [the university where Esther works] wanted to organise a press conference. I said, “Yes, I can do a press conference, but not at the time you said, because my daughter has a small concert with her chorus, so I have to be there with her.” They kindly changed the press conference time. Then we had a party.
Can you tell me a bit more about your research?
To know what works or doesn’t work in social policy, we don’t have to use guesswork. We can use the same methods as in medical science. When you’re looking at a particular policy, basically what you want to know is what would’ve happened if that policy had not taken place. Or, if you look at a particular program or an intervention, what would have happened if the world were different?
But you’d never observe the same person with and without the new policy. In the same way that when you’re trying to test a new drug, you never observe the person with the drug and without the drug. The way this is solved for medical research is to create randomised control trials. You take a sufficiently large group of people, randomly select, let’s say, half of them and give them the new drug. The other half gets the standard of care.
This wasn’t done that often, or maybe close to never, in social policy or in development economics until Michael Kremer, really, and Abhijit Banerjee started experimenting with it. There were some examples of randomised control trials in US social policy, but few and far between. It’s really important to do it that way. In the absence of these randomised control trials, if you’re trying to look at the impact, say, of providing textbooks in school, you never know whether the results are different in the schools that provide textbooks and those that don’t because the schools are different for some other reason. The randomised control trials solve this fundamental data problem, and it’s a powerful tool that can be used across many, many sectors and many, many geographies and teaches some very solid lessons that we can move forward from.
In what ways has winning the Nobel changed your life academically and otherwise?
The poet Seamus Heaney described winning it as a benign avalanche, uncalled-for, unexpected, and taking everything in its wake. For me, I don’t know really. It’s hard to distinguish what happened between the Nobel Prize and COVID because we got the prize in the fall of 2019, and COVID happened in the very beginning of 2020. There’s a before and after the prize, which coincides with before and after COVID.
In many ways, the basic day-to-day work is the same. We’re still quite young and active, and we have to do our research project, which continues. We have to teach students, and we love doing that. The day-to-day doesn’t really change. In other ways, of course it does, because we were already part of a movement [the “randomista movement”]. Winning the Nobel Prize is not so much for us, but for an entire movement. We feel responsible for sharing it, not just in terms of giving credit, but also in terms of whatever makes the movement grow faster.
That gives us responsibility in terms of presenting the work, sharing it and making sure it has policy impact. At the same time, it also provides us with more tools. People are more willing to listen to us and access is made easier, which we can also build upon to ensure that the movement thrives.
Are there any downsides to winning a Nobel?
You can’t really complain. It’s really fantastic, first of all because it demonstrates the power of our movement. It was unexpected because we were so young, and you don’t usually win a Nobel Prize that early in your career. It was a testimonial to how strong that movement is. Plus, to the extent we can help, we can use it to help further policies that are going to help the poor, which is what we went into economics for and why we get up in the morning. Then, there is really no reason to complain.
Of course, you can complain anyway, even if there is no reason to do that. If there is only one complaint is that it creates an enormous number of conflicting demands on one’s time. It becomes almost 20 per cent of my job just to manage what I should be doing at any given time, because there are so many things I would like to do, people I would like to be responsive to and I feel they have a great thing going and I should be supportive by being present.
But there are only 24 hours in a day. I don’t mind being busy, that’s not the problem. But I mind having to say no all the time and trying to decide who to say no to, even if I feel that I would like to participate and help. I guess that’s the only downside. But compare it to the megaphone it gives us and the opportunity for research and policy action…
At age 46, you were the youngest person to win the prize in this area. Do you have any advice for other younger academics who want to make a change in the world?
Well, I was the youngest to win the prize, but I wasn’t that young. I don’t know if I’m so well placed to give advice to young academics. But I think the key, and it’s going to sound very trite but let me say it anyways, is that you really have to do what seems important and feasible to you without worrying about the greater implication, whether that will ever win you a Nobel Prize or will even be sufficient to finish your dissertation.
What I’m seeing with a lot of PhD students, in particular, is that they are concerned that their ideas are not good enough or they’re not big enough. I really went from one small idea to the next one. It’s only over time that you realise that some of these ideas have more echo than you thought. Maybe the collective, all of these ideas taken together, as well as other people working in the same area, have created something that is very different, very powerful.
I think it’s very difficult as an individual to understand the importance of what you do. You just have to assume that it’s important to others if it’s important to you and do it without so much asking, what’s the vision? Where is it leading me? In a way I am not someone who had a huge vision and yet a vision emerged from the collective work effort.
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- This blog post is an edited transcript of Esther Duflo’s interview for the LSE IQ podcast.
- The post represents the views of the author(s), not the position of LSE Business Review or the London School of Economics and Political Science.
- Featured image by LSE/Laurie Noble.
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