Abhijit Banerjee

“Anyone who has a child knows the importance of not over-playing your hand. He was up all night playing some game on his smartphone and you feel like saying that if it happens again the phone is gone. Forever. Till he is old enough to buy his own. Till then he can have your old Nokia.”

“The poverty line in the U.S., for example, has nothing to do with the poverty line in India. It is a relative poverty line. It is reset from time to time but it is related to U.S. median income, so if I set that to be the absolute poverty line everyone in India would essentially be poor.”

“If people don't want blue-collar work, our labour costs will remain high and our competitiveness low.”

“What makes a leader great is not the fact that she (or he) has all the answers, but the ability to inspire and empower us to find the answers.”

“A universal cash transfer in the form of a minimum guaranteed income would mean that automatically everyone has something to fall back on without having to deal with the vagaries of their local panchayat.”

“I was an Indian with zero sense of caste till I was 20. That's an unusual privilege but it came out of the fact that I was a middle-class Bengali.”

“It is undeniable that the looming environmental crisis is partly the consequence of population growth.”

“If the BJP government, like the Congress party, had asked what were the numbers on the fraction of people under a particular income, would I have not told them the truth? I would have told them exactly. I would have been as willing.”

“This is why universities, and civil society more generally, are so important for a democracy like ours, founded on a genuine idealism that we have a hard time holding on to. They provide a space to question whatever we are doing in the name of things we say we believe in or might believe in.”

“Investors don't like being in a world where everything is held up by and waiting for an approval from a very small number of people.”

“If democracy as we know it has to survive the elites have to regain their credibility. And they have to start by admitting that their economic model is broken.”

“In my own work, I have written about how our public sector bank officials avoid making any new lending decisions - because lending always exposes them to some (infinitesimal) risk of being blamed for the loan going wrong.”

“If you want to leave move money in the hands of poor people, you cannot do it through personal income tax cuts. You have to just give them money.”

“There is no doubt that in the last years of the UPA's rule, a certain lethargy had set into the way the central government went about its business.”

“Every nation necessarily inhabits a morally compromised space. All too often our ideals seem to be held to ransom by what we believe, rightly or wrongly, to be objective reality.”

“If you happen to be mostly depressed about the state of your life, I don't know whether you feel like doing impulse control.”

“Policy change is nothing if it's not patient work.”

“Partly, identity politics is a result of economic failure.”

“For me, psychologically, I am very much an Indian.”

“Insurance is important for protecting the health of people and Ujjwala is quite useful to low-income women.”