ABHIJIT BANERJEE AND ESTHER DUFLO both came face-to-face
with the harsh reality of extreme poverty early on in their
lives—Banerjee as a child growing up in India, and Duflo
through her mother’s work as a pediatrician in war zones.
After joining MIT’s Economics Department, they teamed
up to try to answer the question of what policies actually
make a difference in reducing poverty and fostering
development. For their pioneering work in the use of
randomized control trials to study poverty reduction,
Banerjee and Duflo shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in
Economics with Michael Kremer. (Duflo is the youngest-
ever recipient of a Nobel in economics and only the
second woman to be awarded the prize.) In “How Poverty
Ends” (page 22), Banerjee and Duflo draw on their
decades of research to consider what has accounted for
the remarkable decline in poverty in recent decades—
and what, if anything, can be done to ensure that
progress continues.Born in Liberia and raised in the United Kingdom after
her family fled civil war, MIATTA FAHNBULLEH studied at
Oxford and then got her doctorate at the London School
of Economics, hoping to one day fight for economic justice
in the developing world. Instead, she ended up taking on
growing inequality at home, working on economic policy
for the Labour Party and the British government, including
as deputy director of the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit.
Now chief executive of the New Economics Foundation, a
think tank devoted to grassroots economic transformation,
Fahnbulleh argues in “The Neoliberal Collapse” (page 38)
that the failure of free-market orthodoxy has paved the
way for a new agenda inspired by socialist ideals.NICHOLAS LEMANN, a former dean of the Columbia Jour-
nalism School, has been a writer and editor at Texas
Monthly, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and The New
Yorker. He has also written five books, including The Big
Test, his history of meritocracy in the United States, and the
recently published Transaction Man, his account of the
seismic economic and political changes reshaping the
United States. In “Unmerited” (page 140), he takes up
many of those issues in a review of Daniel Markovits’s The
Meritocracy Trap, which he argues puts too much blame
for U.S. society’s ills on elite colleges and universities.CONTRIBUTORS
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