Gori Girl

Social Experiments to Fight Poverty

Esther Duflo, a development economist at MIT, recently won the John Bates Clark Medal – which is basically means the economics field is saying “You’re brilliant, doing amazing work, but not quite wrinkly enough to win win the Nobel. Please stick around for 20 more years and Sweden will be calling.”

Duflo’s work is all about figuring out what sort of aid programs work and what don’t, so that our aid efforts end up actually helping the poor – basically, she’s taking development work out of the dark age, “we think using leeches to rebalance the humors will help” era of thinking and into an era where scientifically rigorous experiments will let us know what actually does work. In the video above (from the wonderful TED)she explains the sort of work she does, and the results from some of her studies – for instance, in one experiment in Udaipur, India she was able to figure out a way to increase full child immunization six fold for only pennies per child. It’s a very understandable and clear talk, and I highly encourage you to give it 15 minutes of your time.

India (And Cross-Cultural Marriage): It Gets Easier

Ringing endorsement, eh? But let me explain…

Our recent trip to India was:

• Delicious. There wasn’t a single day where we didn’t have great food – of all sorts: chocolate confections at Barista, Maharaja Macs from McDonlds, crazy spicy Indo-Chinese prawns, the best chole bhature both Aditya and I have ever had, endless kabobs cooked to order, and simple-but-amazing home food. I won’t mention how much weight I gained, but let’s just say that there’s a reason I’m now working out six times a week.
• Heart-warming. We saw a lot of family, some of whom I’d never met, as well as a fair number of friends and close teachers that Aditya hadn’t seen since high school. More than once there was a dispute over who we would stay with, or who would get to take us around the city, which was both endearing and a bit awkward (for me).
• Tiring . We visited Delhi, most of the cities of Rajasthan, Agra, Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, Shantiniketan, and Delhi again in just a little over three weeks. Whew!
• Enchanting. Hands down, I saw and met more amazing places and people on this trip than any other I’ve been on. We took thousands of pictures, and could have easily taken thousands more.
• Full of only-in-India moments. From turning a corner to see a cow giving birth on a narrow street in Jaisalmer (post with graphic pictures to follow in the future) to amazingly incessant begging in Ajmer to traveling on a bus-rickshaw in Calcutta, our trip was filled with times where we’d simply have to turn to each other and laugh.

One thing India wasn’t, however, was hard. Let’s put that in bold:

India, this time around, wasn’t hard.

And that fact really surprised me – so much that it’s taken over a month to write my first post on the trip as I try to figure out why traveling though India wasn’t the challenge that it was the first time.