Even though only six couples have shared Nobel Prizes since
it started back in 1901, does the 2019 Nobel Economics laureates finally
achieved what Alfred Nobel refers to as “…conferred the greatest benefit on
mankind…”?
By: Ringo Bones
When MIT professors of economics – Abhijit Banerjee and
Esther Duflo, who are also a married couple – and also Michael Kremer, who is
an economics professor at Harvard shared the 2019 Nobel Economics Prize, the
reasons on why they were awarded the prestigious prize is far from
straightforward from the point of view of what the layperson was assumed to
understand about the “abstruse” subject of economics. I mean the 2019 Nobel
Laureates’ ideas of tackling poverty seems to go against the grain of what
passes as “white Anglo Saxon Protestant work ethic”, never mind the so-called “trickle-down
economics” put forth by then US President Ronald Reagan and his “conservative
cohorts”. I mean the so-called white paper that made Banerjee, Duflo and Kremer
the 2019 Nobel Economics Prize laureates could even infuriate Donald Trump and
his supporters if ever it is adopted by the US federal government as an anti-poverty
measure.
Given that President Trump and his “conservative cohorts”
has recently ridiculed the concept of a universal basic income, an extreme
poverty alleviating idea advocated by 2020 Democratic Party presidential candidate
Andrew Yang . Unfortunately for Trump, the Nobel Committee for Economics has
declared earlier in 2019 that “This year’s Laureates have introduced a new
approach to obtaining reliable answers about the best way to fight global
poverty”. But is the concept of a universal basic income and other
left-leaning poverty eradication ideas as seen from the perspective of Donald Trump
and his supporters really the best thing since free money?
Even though Pierre and Marie Curie – the couple who shared
the 1903 Nobel Physics Prize were the first husband and wife team to do so,
there are four others before this year’s Nobel Economics Prize laureates. The
husband and wife team of Banerjee and Duflo are current professors at MIT who
co-founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. It is a global research
center committed to injecting scientific evidence into poverty-reduction
policy. Banerjee and Duflo also wrote the ground-breaking book titled Poor
Economics, which lays out empirical approaches to eradicating poverty. Harvard
professor Michael Kremer proposed the O-Ring Theory of Economic Development
which helps explain international economic disparity. He is also associated
with Banerjee and Duflo’s Poverty Action Lab.
