Esther Duflo

Development economist whose randomized-controlled-trial (RCT) work is the evidentiary backbone of the cash-over-microcredit argument running through Kyle’s anti-poverty notes. With Abhijit V. Banerjee she co-authored Poor Economics — A Radical Rethinking of The Way To Fight Global Poverty, the book that brought the RCT method to development economics (source: Poor Economics — A Radical Rethinking of The Way To Fight Global Poverty).

Her most-cited contribution across the wiki is the Hyderabad, India microcredit RCT. Rutger Bregman leans on it directly in Utopia For Realists: Duflo “set up a fatal RCT in Hyderabad” and “demonstrated that, all the heartwarming anecdotes notwithstanding, there is no hard evidence that microcredit is effective at combating poverty and illness. Handing out cash works way better” — and “cash handouts may be the most extensively studied anti-poverty method around” (source: Utopia For Realists). That finding anchors several concept pages: in Universal Basic Income her RCTs are cited as evidence that the binding constraint on the poor is simply a lack of money; in Effective Altruism she supplies the rigorous-giving / RCT methodology Kyle credits even while holding EA’s ideology at arm’s length; and she is the empirical spine of Bregman’s case that “utopian” ideas like UBI and Open Borders are practical rather than fanciful.

Context: Esther Duflo is a French-American economist at MIT and co-founder of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). In 2019 she, Banerjee, and Michael Kremer shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty; she was the youngest person and the second woman to win the prize.

Where this appears

• Poor Economics — A Radical Rethinking of The Way To Fight Global Poverty — co-author (with Banerjee); the book applying RCTs to poverty.
• Utopia For Realists — the Hyderabad microcredit RCT and the cash-beats-microcredit verdict, central to Bregman’s anti-poverty chapter.
• Effective Altruism — credited for the RCT / rigorous-giving methodology Kyle finds persuasive.
• Universal Basic Income — her RCTs cited as evidence the poor’s binding constraint is a lack of money.
• Rutger Bregman — author who marshals her cash-transfer studies as practical evidence for utopian ideas.