Abhijit Banerjee Quotes

I went back to graduate school with the clear intention that what I wanted to do with my life was to improve societies, and the way to do that was to find out what made economies work the way they did or fail to work.

It became clear I wanted to be a development economist. I mean, I said I wanted to work on the economics of poor countries. And I'd actually say that I don't think that was so much about narrowing the gap as about increasing their incomes, which means economic growth, which is really my prime interest.

An economist is a surgeon with an excellent scalpel and a rough-edged lancet, who operates beautifully on the dead and tortures the living.

Our society is intertwined with the economy that we've built, which is a fantastically complex system. I hope that my writing about it might do some good, but that's not why I do it.

I have dedicated many years to economic study, up to the Ph.D. level, to analyze and understand the inherent weaknesses of aid and why aid policies have consistently failed to deliver on economic growth and poverty alleviation.

I really enjoyed Princeton as a graduate student.

I studied economics and made it my career for two reasons. The subject was and is intellectually fascinating and challenging, particularly to someone with taste and talent for theoretical reasoning and quantitative analysis.

People today don't become economists to make the world a better place.

Global poverty is falling faster today than at any time in human history.

Political economy came into being as a natural result of the expansion of trade, and with its appearance elementary, unscientific huckstering was replaced by a developed system of licensed fraud, an entire science of enrichment.

I studied economics with some teachers from ESADE. It's a really good school here in Spain. They helped me to understand a little about numbers, stats, economics, etc.

While Obama's economic policies have failed to spur growth, our anti-poverty programs have long failed to promote upward mobility and move people from welfare to work.

I never, never in my life took a course in economics.

Federal policies must understand the linkages between economic growth, social mobility, and a strong middle class.

My definition of economic development is economic growth.

Political Economy as a branch of science is extremely modern; but the subject with which its enquiries are conversant has in all ages necessarily constituted one of the chief practical interests of mankind.

As the science of economics...exploded the fallacies of every brand of utopianism, it was outlawed and stigmatized as unscientific.

Any man who is only an economist is unlikely to be a good one.

I'm going to be honest: I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated.

The economy is a thoughtless weather system.

Economics is not a morality play.

Studying economics is not a good preparation for dealing with it.

Political Economy, in truth, has never pretended to give advice to mankind with no lights but its own; though people who knew nothing but political economy (and therefore knew it ill) have taken upon themselves to advise, and could only do so by such lights as they had.

Economics is a form of brain damage.

We have the ability now to arrange global economic institutions so that poverty declines to a fraction of what it is now.