Asian Window

Which economists are managing to do influential work on the crucial questions facing modern society? David Leonhardt in the New York Times on the small group of economists who work at the Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT, led by Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee. “They want to overhaul development aid so that more of it is spent on programs that actually make a difference.”

It was only a decade ago that economics seemed to be an old and tired discipline. The field no longer had intellectual giants like John Maynard Keynes or Milton Friedman who were shaping public policy by the sheer force of their ideas. Instead, it was devolving into a technical discipline that was even less comprehensible than it was relevant.

Some Wall Street firms had become hesitant to hire Ph.D. economists, and the number of undergraduates majoring in the subject was plummeting. “A good deal of modern economic theory,” John Cassidy wrote in an article titled “The Decline of Economics” that appeared in The New Yorker in 1996, “simply doesn’t matter much.”

More:

Similar Posts:

• If you’re coming home again
• The Nobel prize for economics: crisis of legitimacy
• Can manly Advani match weakling Manmohan?
• Homeward bound
• Capitalism beyond the crisis