Esther Duflo Quotes

This I hope will be the age of experiment in government.

But I'm a big believer that government does not have a monopoly on good ideas.

We can do better in higher education. And it is more than just technology. It's also an attitude on the part of faculty. We need to think through how we can produce a better quality product at less cost.

You can always improve on something, the technology is different today, but I would leave it well alone. If there was something that was incomplete, that might be interesting... because I do that on my website.

Governments that invest billions in new hardware still find it hard to accept that they might benefit just as much from systematic innovation in such things as child development or cutting crime.

Technological advances have brought our nation to a point where momentous public choices are inescapable.

Stasis ... is the norm in American social policy, and innovations ... are the exceptions.

I wanted to automate any part of my life that I could. And the over-the-top solutions are more fun than the useful ones.

In our case, I, a working engineer, inventor and scientist, am bringing new innovation to campaigning to enable a grass-roots movement.

I'm always tweaking, always trying to make it better, constantly moving the levers and dials.

Microsoft has had its success by doing low-cost products and constantly improving those products and we've really redefined the IT industry to be something that's about a tool for individuals.

The job of a social entrepreneur is to recognize when a part of society is stuck & to provide new ways to get it unstuck.

Humans change themselves through technology.

Research is a way of taking calculated risks to bring about incalculable consequences.

In science, a path that turns out to be a dead end is very useful because you don't devote resources to focusing on that; you go elsewheres.

Mere lack of success does not discredit a method, for there are many things that determine and perpetuate our sanctified ways of doing things besides their success in reaching their proposed ends.

Always remember, however, that there’s usually a simpler and better way to do something than the first way that pops into your head.

Making little videos that you know are going to be on tiny windows is a whole different thing. I don't know what it's going to lead to necessarily, but it's certainly fun.

Spin-off technologies are changing the culture. Even if you don't become an engineer you could be a poet, a journalist, a lawyer, but you will be thinking innovation and your actions within society, who you vote for, what you value, all become a participant in an innovation economy.

Obviously I was either onto something, or on something.

If you double the number of experiments you do per year you're going to double your inventiveness.

Technology is constantly changing and brings you automatically into the present. In that way, it automatically makes you build for this time.

He [Louis Brandais] did believe in the states famously as laboratories of democracy, to use that resonant phrase that Tea Party and conservative libertarians have embraced today because he loves state experimentation.

You innovate in ways that stoke your economy. Because innovations in science and technology are the engines of 21st century economies.

Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.