In economics of helping the poor, Abhijit Banerjee gives clear answers

The 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences has been awarded to three economists: Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer. The first two teach at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the last named at Harvard University; both campuses are in Cambridge, Massachusetts and their development economic programmes often share resources and students. They received the award for their contribution to reviving development economics, particularly through the popularisation of “randomised control trials” (RCTs) that break larger questions about policy interventions into smaller, easier to test studies.
The Nobel Committee highlighted how their “experiment-based approach has transformed development economics” over the past decades. They mentioned specifically how, as a result of one such study, “more than five million Indian children have benefited from programmes of remedial tutoring in schools”.
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Banerjee, Duflo and Kremer together have launched a movement within development economics that seeks to ensure that clear, unambiguous answers can be found to the question of whether a particular policy intervention is effective. This is extremely relevant when it comes to framing policy in low- and middle-income countries, where state capacity is quite limited and it is particularly necessary to be able to prioritise more effective policies over less. Duflo and Banerjee’s book, “Poor Economics”, is an argument for such evidence-based policy, particularly in the Indian context.
While Duflo and Banerjee--together with another Indian-origin economist, Sendhil Mullainathan--set up the influential Poverty Action Lab in MIT in the early 2000s, it was Michael Kremer who, with his studies of schools in Kenya, first popularised RCTs. The idea behind such policy trials is to treat an intervention similarly to, for example, a medical treatment or new drug that is being scrutinised. If a particular group can be randomly divided into a control set and an experimental set, and then the latter is the one exposed to the policy treatment, then by comparing the outcomes on the control and experimental group the analyst can be more certain that other factors are not confounding the results. For example, if half the schools in a district are randomly chosen for a special trial — for example, biometric attendance records for teachers — and the other half are not, then comparing school outcomes afterwards makes a pretty unarguable case that such records do (or do not) help improve learning outcomes.

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The effect of such rigour on policy analysis is considerable, and as a consequence the RCT movement has almost taken over the development economics field. This change is not without its critics. Some argue that by reducing problems to manageable sizes for an RCT, the development economics profession is avoiding the really big, hard questions about whether systemic change is needed for growth and development. But for countries like India where resources, particularly in the least developed states and areas, are hard to come by, the results of RCTs are vital input into decisions. They ensure that vital years and budgets are not wasted.
The MIT-based Poverty Action Lab has an India affiliate at the Institute for Financial Management and Research in Chennai. Banerjee and Duflo — who are married to each other — are frequent visitors to India, and the former has also written extensively on the Indian economy’s current problems. He is an alumnus of South Point School and Presidency University in Kolkata, and also did a Masters degree at JNU before his PhD at Harvard.

2019 Nobel Chemistry Prize awarded for research on lithium-ion batteries

Three researchers won the Nobel Chemistry Prize on Wednesday for the development of lithium-ion batteries, paving the way for smartphones and a fossil fuel-free society.
John Goodenough of the United States -- at 97 the oldest person to be awarded a Nobel prize -- Britain's Stanley Whittingham, and Japan's Akira Yoshino will share the nine million Swedish kronor (about USD 914,000 or 833,000 euros) prize equally, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

"This lightweight, rechargeable and powerful battery is now used in everything from mobile phones to laptops and electric vehicles... (and) can also store significant amounts of energy from solar and wind power, making possible a fossil fuel-free society," the jury said.
"Lithium batteries have revolutionised our lives since they first entered the market in 1991," it said, adding they were "of the greatest benefit to humankind".
Seeking an alternative source of power during the oil crisis of the 1970s, Whittingham discovered a way to harness the potential energy in lithium, a metal so light it floats on water.
He constructed a battery partly made of lithium that utilised the element's natural tendency to shed electrons, thereby transferring energy.
However, the battery was too unstable to be used.
Goodenough built on Whittingham's prototype, substituting a different metal compound and doubling the potential energy of the battery to four volts.
This paved the way for far more powerful and durable batteries in the future.
In 1985, Yoshino instead used a carbon-based material that stores lithium ions, finally rendering the battery commercially viable.
The culmination of the trio's research resulted in the most powerful, lightweight and rechargeable battery ever seen.
When asked what type of researcher he is, Yoshino told a Tokyo press conference that a good scientist needed two qualities.
"One thing is that you have to have a flexible brain. Flexibility. The other is tenacity. You stay persistent and never give up," he said.
Yoshino, 71, works at the Asahi Kasei Corporation in Tokyo and is a professor at Meijo University in Nagoya, Japan, while Goodenough holds the Cockrell Chair in Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.
Whittingham, 77, is a professor at the Binghamton University, State University of New York.
The trio will receive the prize from King Carl XVI Gustaf at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of scientist Alfred Nobel who created the prizes in his last will and testament.
Last year, the honour went to US scientists Frances Arnold and George Smith and British researcher Gregory Winter for developing enzymes used for greener and safer chemistry and antibody drugs with less side effects.
Arnold was just the fifth woman to clinch chemistry's most prestigious honour since Marie Curie was honoured in 1911.
This year's Nobel prize season kicked off on Monday with the Medicine Prize awarded to Americans William Kaelin and Gregg Semenza, and Britain's Peter Ratcliffe.
They won for research into how human cells sense and adapt to changing oxygen levels, opening up new strategies to fight such diseases as cancer and anaemia.
On Tuesday, the Physics Prize honoured Canadian-American cosmologist James Peebles and Swiss astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz for research on how the Universe evolved after the Big Bang, and the first discovery of a planet outside our solar system, known as an exoplanet.
The Literature Prize will follow on Thursday, with two laureates to be crowned after a sexual harassment scandal forced the Swedish Academy to postpone the 2018 award, for the first time in 70 years.
Some names creating a buzz ahead of this year's literature prize are Canadian poet Anne Carson, Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Romanian poet and novelist Mircea Cartarescu and Polish writer and activist Olga Tokarczuk.
On Friday the action moves to Norway where the Peace Prize is awarded, with bookies predicting a win for Swedish teen climate activist Greta Thunberg on betting sites such as Ladbrokes.
The Economics Prize will wrap up the Nobel prize season on Monday, October 14.

V S Naipaul, author who spared neither colonizer nor colonized, dies at 85

V S Naipaul, the Nobel laureate who documented the migrations of peoples, the unraveling of the British Empire, the ironies of exile and the clash between belief and unbelief in more than a dozen unsparing novels and as many works of nonfiction, died on Saturday at his home in London. He was 85.
His family confirmed the death in a statement, The Associated Press reported.

In many ways embodying the contradictions of the postcolonial world, Mr Naipaul was born of Indian ancestry in Trinidad, went to Oxford University on a scholarship and lived the rest of his life in England, where he forged one of the most illustrious literary careers of the last half century. He was knighted in 1990.
Compared in his lifetime to Conrad, Dickens and Tolstoy, he was also a lightning rod for criticism, particularly by those who read his portrayals of third-world disarray as apologies for colonialism.
Yet Mr. Naipaul exempted neither colonizer nor colonized from his scrutiny. He wrote of the arrogance and self-aggrandizement of the colonizers, yet exposed the self-deception and ethical ambiguities of the liberation movements that swept across Africa and the Caribbean in their wake. He brought to his work moral urgency and a novelist’s attentiveness to individual lives and triumphs.
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Mr. Naipaul personified a sense of displacement. Having left behind the circumscribed world of Trinidad, he was never entirely rooted in England. In awarding him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy described him as “a literary circumnavigator, only ever really at home in himself, in his inimitable voice.”
Yet his existential homelessness was as much willed as fated. Although he spent his literary career mining his origins, Mr. Naipaul fiercely resisted the idea of being tethered to a hyphen, or to a particular ethnic or religious identity. He once left a publisher when he saw himself listed in the catalog as a “West Indian novelist.” A Hindu, though not observant, Mr. Naipaul was a staunch defender of Western civilization. His guiding philosophy was universalism.
“What do they call it? Multi-culti? It’s all absurd, you know,” he said in 2004. “I think if a man picks himself up and comes to another country he must meet it halfway.” It was the kind of provocative statement that won him both enemies and admirers over the years.
An often difficult man with a fierce temper who dressed sedately in tweed jackets, Mr. Naipaul had a face of hawklike severity. “After one look from him, I could skip Yom Kippur,” Saul Bellow once joked. If displeased by questions, Mr. Naipaul would sometimes walk out on public appearances and hang up on journalists. Although he could be mischievous and had a deep sense of humor, he was prone to melancholy.
Mr. Naipaul practiced yoga until his back grew too weak, and often lamented that writing took a physical toll. He would spend months cogitating at home in London or more often in his book-filled cottage in the Wiltshire countryside, outside Salisbury, which he shared with his first wife and later his second, and with a black-and-white cat named Augustus.
He continued to write novels even after declaring the form a 19th-century relic, no longer able to capture the complexities of the contemporary world. Yet his fiction was always in conversation with his nonfiction; each new book built on the ones that came before. Mr. Naipaul wrote relatively slowly, sometimes only a paragraph a day, and was intensely protective of his work. Diana Athill, who edited 19 of his books at the London publisher Andre Deutsch between the 1950s and the ′70s, said editing Mr. Naipaul involved providing him with much reassurance.
“You didn’t actually ever have to do a single thing to any of his books,” Ms. Athill told The New Yorker in 1994. “But you did have to do a lot of attempting to cheer him up, because he would deliver a book and he would be happy when he delivered it, and then really soon he would go into a pit: ‘What is the point? What is the point of writing books? I’m never going to write another book.’”
An Ancestry in India
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born on Aug. 17, 1932, in Chaguanas, Trinidad, where his paternal grandfather had emigrated from India in the 1880s as an indentured servant to work on the sugar plantations. His father, Seepersad, was a newspaper reporter for The Trinidad Guardian and an aspiring fiction writer who as a child was luckily allowed to go to school; his older brother was sent to work in the cane fields for eight cents a day and his sister remained illiterate. His mother, Droapatie Capildeo, was from a large, prosperous family, and when Mr. Naipaul was 6 the family moved in with them in a big house in Port of Spain.
The second of seven children, he was particularly close to his older sister, Kamla. His younger and only brother, Shiva, who was also a novelist, died in 1985.
Educated in English schools in Trinidad, Mr. Naipaul said he owed his writing ambitions to his father, who read to him, among other things, from Booker T. Washington’s “Up From Slavery.”
His first years in England in the 1950s were full of panic and anxiety. In 1952, while at University College, Oxford, he had a mental breakdown.
“Before I became secure as a writer, it was a long, unbroken period of melancholy,” he told The New Yorker in 1994.
From 1954 to 1956, he edited a radio program on literature for the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Caribbean Service. His voice was perfect for the airwaves — rich and mellowed by tobacco. His crisp English accent had a slight Caribbean twist, and he often repeated phrases for emphasis. “I speak 130 words a minute,” he told The New York Times in 2005. “I know this precisely from my radio days.”
It was in 1954, while toiling in the old Edwardian-Victorian hotel that housed the BBC freelancer’s office, that Mr. Naipaul began writing fiction, conjuring up memories of his childhood in Port of Spain “on an old BBC typewriter, and on smooth, ‘non-rustle’ BBC script paper,” as he recounted nearly 30 years later in an essay, “Prologue to an Autobiography.”
“To become a writer, that noble thing, I had thought it necessary to leave,” he wrote elsewhere. “Actually to write, it was necessary to go back. It was the beginning of self-knowledge.”
His first novel, “The Mystic Masseur” (1957), about Ganesh Ramsumair, a failed schoolteacher who becomes a masseur and later guru and politician in Trinidad, was well received.
Ferociously prolific, Mr. Naipaul published a book every year or two for much of his career. His breakthrough was his joyous, deeply autobiographical fourth novel, “A House for Mr. Biswas” (1961). Set in Trinidad, it is the story of a middle-aged journalist’s efforts to free himself of his dependence on his wife’s wealthier, domineering family and lay claim to his own corner of the world.
Written when he was not yet 30, the book cemented Mr. Naipaul’s standing among the most important writers of his generation; writing in The Times in 1971, Nadine Gordimer, the South African novelist and later a fellow Nobel laureate, called it “magnificent.” It was eventually published by the Modern Library of 20th-century classics.
In 1955 Mr. Naipaul married Patricia Hale, an Englishwoman he had met at Oxford. The two were extremely close — she read all his work in progress — but their relationship was puzzling to outsiders, many of whom saw her as self-effacing and subservient. Although she often traveled with Mr. Naipaul, Ms. Hale is mentioned only once in his books, and not by name. The couple never had children.
His childlessness, he told The New Yorker in 1994, “really comes from a detestation of the squalling background of children that I grew up with in my extended family.” He also confessed that he had been “a great prostitute man” in the early years of his marriage and acknowledged that in the 1970s he had fallen in love with an Anglo-Argentine woman who became his longtime mistress. After Ms. Hale died of cancer in 1996, Mr. Naipaul dedicated a new edition of “A House for Mr. Biswas” to her memory.
‘To Explore the World’
Mr. Naipaul began writing nonfiction in the 1960s. “I thought nonfiction gave one a sense to explore the world, the other world, the world one didn’t know fully,” he said in 2005. “I thought if I didn’t have this resource of nonfiction I would have dried up perhaps. I’d have come to the end of my material.”
For his first nonfiction book, “The Middle Passage” (1962), Mr. Naipaul returned to the West Indies. He charted inter-island racial tensions in Trinidad; analyzed the cultural “mimicry” he saw as central to colonial identity; questioned how the region, then on the brink of self-rule, would govern itself; and observed that the smaller Caribbean islands “in the name of tourism, are selling themselves into a new slavery.”
Some found his portrayal distasteful. Derek Walcott, the Caribbean-born poet and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature, called him “V. S. Nightfall” in a poem, and said his prose was scarred by his “repulsion towards Negroes” and the “self-disfiguring sneer that is praised for its probity.” Yet Walcott was pleased when Mr. Naipaul won the Nobel Prize. “It will mean something for the region,” he told The Guardian.
In 1964 Mr. Naipaul published the first of three travelogues about India, “An Area of Darkness.” He found that in spite of his Indian origins, he did not belong there at all.
“No other country was more fitted to welcome a conqueror; no other conqueror was more welcome than the British,” he wrote. “While dominating India they expressed their contempt for it, and projected England; and Indians were forced into a nationalism which in the beginning was like a mimicry of the British.”

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul: Nobel prize winner, fiery author, dies at 85

Nobel Prize-winning British author V S Naipaul has died at the age of 85, his family announced on Saturday.
"He died surrounded by those he loved having lived a life which was full of wonderful creativity and endeavour," his wife Lady Naipaul said in a statement.

She described him as a "giant in all that he achieved".
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul wrote more than 30 books and won the Nobel Literature Prize in 2001.
Born in Trinidad, the son of an Indian civil servant, he studied English literature at Oxford University before basing his life in England.
But he spent much of his time travelling and became a symbol of modern rootlessness.
Awarding him the Nobel, the Swedish Academy said he was a "literary circumnavigator, only ever really at home in himself, in his inimitable voice".
Many of his works examined the traumas of post-colonial change.
One of his major novels was the semi-autobiographical "A House for Mr Biswas", which looked at the almost impossible task for Indian immigrants in the Caribbean of trying to integrate into society while keeping hold of their roots.
He was one of the first winners of the Booker Prize, now Britain's leading literary award, in 1971 for "In A Free State." Naipaul was also outspoken throughout his career, likening former British prime minister Tony Blair to a pirate at the head of a socialist revolution.
He was also disparaging about female novelists, described post-colonial countries as "half-made societies" and argued that Islam both enslaved and attempted to wipe out other cultures.

India achieved in 30 yrs what UK did in 150 yrs: Nobel Laureate Krugman

Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman on Saturday said India has made rapid progress on the economic front but economic inequality in the country remains an issue.
India has become a much "better place to do business" than it was earlier, though the bureaucratic obstacles have not gone away completely but reduced enormously.

"India achieved as much economic progress in t ast) 30 years as the Great Britain did in 150 years. It is a very rapid space of transformation....why does there still seem to be visible poverty in India?
"One problem is high degree of economic inequality," Krugman said at the News 18 Rising India Summit, adding that India has made "enormous strides" in economic progress but the wealth has "not been evenly distributed".
On rising income of middle-class in emerging markets globally, he said: "People, when (they) mostly talk about the story, understandably focus on China, but India is part of the story as well. ...India is still poor, but not in the same level at all. Indian GDP per capita is about 12 per cent of the US level now, which sounds low but that is up from 4 per cent not that long ago.
Terming India's economic growth progress as "extraordinary", he said the country has become (on purchasing power) the world's largest economy overtaking Japan and while being behind the US and China, it is far bigger than any European country.
Attributing factors that played a role in the economic "progress", Krugman said there was a dramatic change in India's policy including liberalised policies taken in early 1990s.
"I am on the Centre-Left, but I do not think the government should have a heavy hand on economy. India used to have License Raj, where bureaucratic obstacles were immense and that has not gone away completely but enormously reduced. India has become a much easier place to do business that it was. The PM said India moved from 148 to 100 in the rankings. That is not a badge of distinction, but it is better than it was," he observed.
According to Krugman, the transformation of policy came at a good time and the country opened up at the right time.
The infrastructure is still a problem but it is better than before, he said.
"India brought policies that opened up possibilities of doing business and made India attractive place for international companies to do business. There has been a real transformation of policies," he said.
The American economist, who won a Nobel Prize in 2008, was also optimistic about India for having first mover's advantage in terms of globalisation of services.
According to him, India's growth story has been quite unique as the services-led growth have not been seen anywhere else in the world and the country can ride the next wave of globalisation on its demographic dividend.
He, however, warned creation of employment and jobs is utmost important to sustain projected growth in demography and lack of manufacturing sector could work against it.
He also touched upon the problem of corruption that the country has been facing.
"There are issues of corruption. You cannot become Denmark with Chinese levels of corruption," he added.