Three economists, including the second woman ever to win the prize, have been awarded the 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Why? For their incredible work that centers on addressing global poverty in manageable, actionable steps, particularly in terms of children’s access to education and health care.
Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer share this year’s award. Duflo and Banerjee are actually a married couple and both professors at MIT, while Kremer is a professor at Harvard. All three are based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Notably, Duflo is only the second woman to win the prize in the 50 years it existed. The first was Elinor Ostrom in 2009. Duflo is also the youngest to win the prize, at 46-years-old.
"Our goal is to make sure that the fight against poverty is based on scientific evidence," Duflo said on Monday as reported by NPR. "It starts from the idea that often the poor are reduced to caricatures and often, even people who try to help them do not actually understand what are the deep roots of the problem."
In layman’s terms, the team’s research looked at how specific interventions (such as access to preventative healthcare) affect people living in poverty in terms of agriculture, medicine, and education. The team sought to determine what does and doesn’t work in fighting poverty step by step, instead of as a broad stroke.
As reported by the Associated Press, for example, the team learned that giving more textbooks to students in western Kenya didn’t actually help students learn more. What did work? According to their research, making lessons relevant to students and giving at-need students more attention proved successful.
The team’s unique approach to addressing global poverty has already had real-world applications with positive results. For example, more than 5 million Indian children have benefited from tutoring in schools. Numerous countries have also introduced subsidies for preventive health care, making it far more accessible.
In a phone call with CNN, Duflo summed up their work, saying, "the essence of our research is to make sure that the fight against poverty is based on scientific evidence."
Duflo also talked about feminism, which is great to see. "We are starting to realize in the profession that the way that we [treat] each other privately and publicly is not conducive all the time to a very good environment for a woman," Duflo said as reported by NPR. "Showing that it is possible for a woman to succeed and to be recognized for success I hope is going to inspire many, many other women to continue working—and then many other men to give them the respect that they deserve, like every single human being."
As a note, the prize is considered part of the Nobel awards, though it wasn’t actually created by Alfred Nobel. The official name of the award is the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. That’s a mouthful! This year, the prize is worth about $915,300 USD.
