Last updated on August 29, 2011
From an article on Esther Duflo by The Guardian‘s IPS News republished by The Guardian:
“Doing her PhD at MIT, she was one of the first doctoral students to apply economics to development, linking the two, at a time when there were few university faculties devoted to the subject.”
I don’t mean to add to the considerable amount of snark (see here, for example) but… Really? In the first development economics class I ever took, back in the late 1990s, I was taught that the first article on development economics was Paul Rosenstein-Rodan’s “Problems of Industrialization of Eastern and Southeastern Europe,” which was published in the Economic Journal in 1943.
Could this mean that Esther Duflo was one of the first doctoral students to apply economics to development at MIT?
Even that is unlikely: the first development economics class I ever took was taught by Jean-Louis Arcand, who received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1991.
(Update: A community coordinator at The Guardian Global Development emailed me to draw my attention to the fact that this was originally a story by IPS News, which The Guardian republished.)
(Update: The author of the story comments on how the original story was quickly corrected on the website.)
From Esther Duflo
It would certainly be a claim to fame, even if it was true for MIT only, but that is not true either…
This is what I posted on the Guardian site:
Interesting comment about me being the first development economist, but fortunately that is not true, by a long, long, long shot…Ted Schultz and Amartya Sen both got a Nobel prize in the field, and development economics has always attracted first rate scholars. That is one of the many things that makes this field a pleasure, actually.
What is true is that at the time I started my dissertation work, it had gotten out of fashion a bit. I remember Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer were teaching this amazing class, and there were about 8 of us in the class, for Harvard and MIT combined. This has radically changed, first because the theory became interesting (thanks to Banerjee, among others), then because the empirical work became exciting (thanks to Kremer among other).
I think what I was trying to explain, in the quote that was weirdly mangled is that, at the time I started doing development, economic theorists had already begun to be interested in the field, and I did contribute to do (but not alone, Michael Kremer had started before me) is to start doing the same thing with empirical methods: applying methods that had been developed elsewhere, with the same care for details, to empirical questions in development economics.
Esther Duflo
Thanks for the clarification, Esther. I didn’t think for a second that you had actually made that claim, as I was pretty sure it was the result of a misquote, but it’s nice to hear from you.
[…] no. Development economics as a formal field had been around since the early 1980s (Note: Marc Bellemare and Duflo have both pointed out that the real roots of this discipline go back to the 1940s), and […]
The statement cited was corrected almost immediately. Let’s now re-focus on the work to alleviate poverty, which was the reason for writing the article in the first place. Thanks.
Thank you for your comment, A.D. I have updated the post accordingly.