May 6, 2021

Esther Duflo shakes hands with the King of Sweden as she is awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2019.TT News Agency, via Reuters

By Francesca Donner

Gender Director

"G.D.P. measures the value added in a country, but life is so much more than that."

— Esther Duflo, Nobel laureate in economics

Esther Duflo is not your average economist.

For one thing, she's a she in a field that is dominated at almost every level by hes. She's also a Nobel laureate — just one of two women who have brought home the prize in economics. She shared the honor in 2019 with Abhijit Banerjee (who is also her husband) and Michael Kremer.

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Dr. Duflo and her colleagues developed the idea of using randomized controlled trials to solve thorny problems like poor education or low vaccine uptake.

In practice, it might look something like this: Let's say a country has an education problem. Students are dropping out of school, and those who stay enrolled aren't learning as much as they should. Instead of airlifting in academic theories, Dr. Duflo and her colleagues might break down the problem into actionable experiments. They might evaluate, for example, the effects on learning when children are given new textbooks or are placed in smaller classes or when families are given a stipend for each child they send to school. Ultimately, the process offers decision-makers an array of approaches to solve a problem — in this case, our hypothetical education problem — that factor in both cost and efficacy.

Dr. Duflo is not without her critics, who have argued that her experiments aren't scalable and that the learnings don't necessarily translate from one context to another. But that's not quite the point. "You never go from a small experiment somewhere to scaling up to the entire world," Dr. Duflo said. But as information accumulates, "you start to understand the overall structure of a problem, and you see what might replicate and what might not."

Dr. Duflo spoke with In Her Words about why she views the G.D.P. is an incomplete measure of success, how to get more women into economics, and how she and her husband split the household chores. Our conversation has been condensed and lightly edited.

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You're in a field that is notoriously awful for women — where promotions and publication are much less likely if you're a woman and where women are more likely than their male peers to be asked condescending questions at conferences. You must often find yourself the only woman at the table. How do we get more women on the path?

About the question of women in economics: It really is at all levels, including the number of young women who choose to become economists. And I think there are two reasons for that.

First, the culture is historically a little bit of a locker room, macho culture. The kind of needless aggressivity that economists somehow think is a way of showing interest in a seminar is not the way that most women have been acculturated to being in the world.

I think the field is realizing that this culture is harmful to men and women; perhaps to women more, but to men, too. We can change it. We can learn to be more civil, and no harm will be done.

The second reason is that for a lot of young people — women, underrepresented minorities — economics seems so useless. The topics of budgets and finance are so far from the kind of idealism that people in general want to bring to the table.

I think we can do better communicating what we do, because once you get into the profession, it turns out that economists work on poverty around the world — discrimination, racism, education. All of these topics are very much core to the profession.

Many people might look at the field and say, "Well, there's no one here who looks like me, so I don't belong." Practically speaking, how would you change that?

First of all, I don't believe that people's preferences are so deeply entrenched that male economists are, by nature, people who cannot stand women. It's just not true. It is just what the social norms progressively evolve into. That can change because people model their behavior on what is being done around them. Something we have started doing in my department that seems really little, but actually I think it's important, is to leave people 10 minutes at the beginning of a talk to make their point before you start asking them questions.

And slowly, little by little, these things make a difference.

Because economists are so enamored of the free market, it took them a little while to realize that the free market of ideas didn't bring to the ideal situation in economics.

TT News Agency, via Reuters

In your book, "Good Economics for Hard Times," you dismiss the narrow view of income and material consumption as crucial indicators of well-being, arguing instead that we should have an expansive view of what constitutes a good life, whether that's having friends or respect and so on. Many people think of economics as disconnected from everyday life, but your idea turns this notion on its head. Tell me more.

One of the mistakes made by economists in general was to agree collectively that G.D.P., and perhaps the stock market, is how we acknowledge success in a country.

G.D.P. measures the value added in a country, but life is so much more than that.

Any top-line number is likely to be misleading and can become a poor measure of what you're trying to measure. Better to have more than just one number. I think we need median wage; infant mortality; maybe how many years of life people live; maybe a measure of happiness. We can use different numbers that are appropriate at the time.

Once we start taking into account various measures of welfare and happiness, it becomes obvious that the treatment of women and the contribution of women will be acknowledged.

The G.D.P. is just not a tool to do that. We could kind of kluge it by adding some measure of unpaid labor that women do, but it's just not the right measure in the first place.

We would do well in the U.S. to have that conversation — what it is that we care about. And can we focus on those things.

You have noted that humans are not always just incentivized by money. Talk me through that.

The mentality of economists is that people respond to financial incentives, but it turns out that they are not that responsive to financial incentives. If you consider the very rich, when taxes go down, it's not the case that they work more, for example.

There were a lot of worries during the coronavirus pandemic that the $600 weekly allowance under the Cares Act would discourage people from going back to work because it's often more than they would make. But this has been studied by different groups of academics, who have found zero disincentive effect of that act.

People need to have meaning in their life. They need to make a difference in their job. People are looking for respect in the job that they are doing and in the community they're living in, and that's much, much more dominant than the financial incentive.

And that's very important because that means that No. 1, you shouldn't be scared of taxing people. That's not going to make them lazy. No. 2, you shouldn't be scared of distributing money to people. That's not going to make them lazy.

This year has had a massive effect on women. How might we use this moment of greater awareness to shift some of the systemic issues?

The first order effect — like labor force participation — is probably not going to be good news, but the hope is that the second order effect — which is the policy reaction — is enough to compensate for it, or maybe, if we are wildly optimistic, overcompensate for it.

That is what we are seeing in the U.S. with child support included in Covid relief and child care in the proposed infrastructure bill. To some extent, it's a response accelerated by the crisis. And it could have a long lasting, persistent effect that allows women to get care for their kids, while they pursue their own careers.

I wish I could cite examples of where we can prove this effect, but I don't think we've ever found ourselves quite in this situation. But what we do know, comparing countries, is that in places where child care options are better, women are more likely to go to work.

The current situation is going to give us a chance to experiment with various models, for example, with people starting to work more from home. On the one hand, that's bad for women, especially when the kids are home. On the other hand, that creates the possibility for flexible work that might allow some people to be in the labor market when they would not have before.

In light of that, what are some of the biggest opportunities right now?

The first one is this idea of putting dignity back at the center of our social protections. In the U.S., there is this idea that if you need help, you're probably a welfare queen, or you're someone who is to be treated with suspicion. And as a result, we try to make it difficult.

But in the Covid crisis, we found that, at some point, everyone needed help. People realized that it's not that they were lazy; it's that this massive shock happened. And the government was there to help them. It really is a chance to rethink social protection, not as charity, but as insurance.

The second one is climate change. And that's related because I don't think it's possible to address climate change without first addressing inequalities. Any climate change policy will have losers and winners; and unless you can show that you're good about compensating the losers, you just cannot do climate change policy. If we improve on the idea of social protection, keeping dignity at the center, we'll be in a better place to do things on climate change without scaring people away.

The third one is the question of care. The Covid crisis made it so clear that we need to have a better, more robust system of care that does not collapse when there is a moment of crisis. Putting money in it will create a lot of jobs that are very robust, because they cannot be exported; they cannot be automated.

How do two Nobel laureates in economics divide up unpaid labor in the home?

Equitably, I think.

Abhijit does everything that has to do with keeping us fed: menu planning, shopping, cooking. He is a very serious cook so that is a lot of work. We wash dishes together, with our au pair.

I do all the logistics: bill paying, fixing stuff, taking care of the house, paying taxes. I also take care of the children — their activities (both planning and ferrying), pediatrician and the like. Sadly, that included staying on top of the 14,561 apps involved with remote schooling.

Every day, I read stories and practice music with the kids. He hangs out with them at night after I have finished reading, before they fall asleep.

We use all the help we can: we have an au pair, someone to help clean the house.

During the lockdown, we shared the extra work more or less equitably between the two of us and the au pair. Shopping and cooking became harder. I took up cleaning and clothes washing, and we divided the day to have a person "on deck" for the kids.

Write to us at inherwords@nytimes.com.

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In Her Words is edited by Francesca Donner. Our art director is Catherine Gilmore-Barnes, and our photo editor is Judith Levitt.

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