A prize for fighting global poverty

The following is an excerpt from an editorial in the Guardian:

Readers of this paper on June 6, 2011, may have spotted an editorial titled “In praise of … Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee.” It was indeed a paean to the two economists and their work to lift people out of poverty. “They make a subtle case for one big argument,” we wrote.

Scroll forward almost a decade to this week, and the judging committee behind the Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel announced that the pair would win this year’s award, alongside their colleague Michael Kremer.

To the lucky trio, we extend our congratulations. To the judges, we say: What took you so long?

A number of precedents are being broken or tested by this welcome decision. At 46, Prof. Duflo is the youngest-ever winner of this prize. She is also only the second woman to win it,

The randomized control trials central to their method owe much to medicine.

Want to find the best way of galvanizing parents to inoculate their children? Take a bunch of poor families in India and offer half a small bag of lentils if they give their kids the jab.

Prof. Banerjee and Prof. Duflo found that that little treat drove up vaccination rates from 5 per cent to almost 40 per cent.

Too much has been claimed for the “randomista” method they use and it does not obviate the role of politics and power in tackling poverty and inequality.

But let’s hope that the judges show even more imagination in the future.