Esther Duflo quotes:

What is lacking in India are decent social services. The health service is a disaster. Education is a disaster.

For millions of girls around the world, motherhood comes too early. Those who bear children as adolescents suffer higher maternal mortality and morbidity rates, and their children are more likely to die in infancy.

The logic is that when you provide schools or any social service to people, they have no choice. They have to take what you give them, because they don't have the money to pay for schools themselves; that's why you provide schools in the first place.

In a way, it has been an advantage for me to be a woman because there is always some academic committee that needs you to fill a quota!

The poor get bored the same as the rest of us. Their happiness might be as important to them as their health.

The differences in income between the poor world and the rich world are so great that people have to be interested.

In technology, we spend so much time experimenting, fine-tuning, getting the absolute cheapest way to do something - so why aren't we doing that with social policy?

Part of me always wanted to do something useful for the world. It came from my mother. She is a paediatrician and she was active in a small NGO for the child victims of war.

And there is a lot of idiosyncrasy. But there are also regularities and phenomena. And what the data is going to be able to do--if there's enough of it--is uncover, in the mess and the noise of the world, some lines of music that actually have harmony. It's there, somewhere.