The WZB honors Esther Duflo
The French-American developmental economist Esther Duflo received the A.SK Social Science Award on Saturday, October 10, at the WZB in recognition of her research on ways to alleviate poverty. The award, which comes with €100,000 in prize money, is one of the best endowed international grants in the social sciences. To study the efficiency of developmental aid measures, Esther Duflo used randomized controlled trials, a method typically applied in medical research, and thereby revolutionized the field of developmental economics.
In her acceptance speech, Duflo, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), gave a quick overview of how the method of randomized controlled trials became more and more accepted over the past ten years. “Today, our experimental method has become almost a standard tool in the economics toolbox.” Duflo is a co-founder of the global J-Pal network, which connects researchers, policy makers and local actors in development countries and poor regions of the developed world.
As Duflo pointed out, randomization is not only a viable method for assessing developmental policy measures. “Perhaps more important are the new ideas that emerge during such projects.” When preparing experimental interventions, researchers, policy makers and nongovernmental organizations collaborate to understand the situation, get informed by the relevant theories and process data from the field. “And very rapidly, they get confronted to the world.”
“This is a game of patience, but also an exhilarating one,” Duflo said. “We are very far from knowing everything we can and need to know, but we can learn more. If we resist the kind of lazy, formulaic thinking which reduces every problem to the same set of general principles; if we accept the possibility of error and subject every idea, including the most apparently commonsensical ones, to rigorous empirical testing; we will be able, not only to construct a toolbox of effective policies, but also to better understand why the poor live the way they do.”
In her award speech, Katrin Göring-Eckhardt, Chair of Bündnis 90/Die Grünen (Alliance 90/The Green Party) in the German Bundestag, praised the scientific and social policy achievements of Duflo and her organization, recommending that policy makers more consistently assess the efficiency of developmental policy programs. By applying the tools developed by Duflo and J-Pal, Göring-Eckhardt said, it becomes possible to give more nuanced answers to questions about efficiency - which makes them indispensable for learning processes in a key policy field.
For a portrait of the award recipient (only available in German), see the current issue of WZB Mitteilungen.
See photos of the award ceremony.