By: BBC News
Nov 19, 2019
Today, trust in economists is barely above that of politicians.
“Economists are always saying on the one hand – but then on the other hand,” says Esther Duflo, professor of poverty alleviation and development economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “That’s why people are always looking for a one-armed economist,” she jokes, quoting former US President Harry Truman’s reputed comment.
But Prof Duflo, who recently won the Nobel Prize in economics alongside her MIT colleague and husband Prof Abhijit Banerjee, and Harvard’s Prof Michael Kremer, has certainly come off the fence in a new book that hits out at some of economists’ prized myths.