Every October, a fixed project that must be pursued - the Nobel Prize.
In the past few days, after reading the heavenly books of the Physics Prize and the Chemistry Prize, and giving high sympathy to Haruki Murakami for the 3,000th time, he finally ushered in the last award of the Nobel Prize in Economics: the Nobel Prize in Economics.
So, who did this year, a discipline that is closely related to our wallets, award the award?
The new "Nobel Prize winners" are Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee and Esther Duflo from MIT and Michael Kremer from Harvard.
It is estimated that most people do not know who they are or what they have done. After all, even the "Citation Laureate Award", which has always been regarded as the "Nobel Prize weather vane", did not guess any of them correctly this time.
Although it has successfully deceived the right person through quantitative analysis...... No, 50 economists were predicted to win.
The three economists who won this year's award, their "main business" is called development economics.
The "development" of development economics, taken from the word "developing countries", emerged in the late 40s of the twentieth century, when the sovereign countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America became independent, and was a discipline specially used to study the economic phenomena of developing countries.
To put it bluntly, this discipline attaches great importance to the study of the development of the poor and backward countries, and tries to find solutions to the problem of poverty, and these three awards are based on their outstanding contributions to human poverty, that is, poverty economics.
It is worth mentioning that this time not only the award-winning discipline is very "young", compared with the previous respected economics award winners, this year's economics award winners are also in their prime, Banerjee and Kremer are both post-60s, the former is 58 years old, the latter is 55 years old, and Banerjee's wife Duflo is post-70s, only 47 years old.
It is the first time that a couple has won the Nobel Prize at the same time, and only four times in the entire history of the Nobel Prize.
Next, let's focus on the Banerjees' research on the pitfalls of poverty and how to get out of it.
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Poor people don't like to learn? Self-motivated heart does not carry this pot
The field of "poverty economics" sounds relatively unfamiliar, but Banerjee's research is actually more relevant to our lives than other Nobel laureates in recent years.
Like many paradoxes: why do poor people like to buy TVs and game consoles instead of investing in their own studies? Why are poor people more likely to have no life plan?
Banerjee's work is, first and foremost, to change the way people understand poverty.
In the past, the questions just now were often thought to be related to personal qualities, or "self-motivation", but once these are attributed to morality, then government policies can easily become moral preaching.
Banerjee's work corrects these perceptions and explains the economics behind them. For example, because poor people tend to have more troubles in their lives, they need tools that alleviate their worries more than others—like TVs, mobile phones, junk food, and game consoles.
If you invest in personal learning, then often this process of return on investment takes a long time, and the poor often lack patience due to economic reasons, and life during this period will still be more troublesome and boring.
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Poor people are reluctant to spend money on health?
In terms of health issues, it's actually the same.
The Banerjees found that the poor spend a lot of money and time on health and medical care — even on or even higher than the middle class — but the results are not good. Why? Because the poor often lack the necessary medical and hygiene knowledge, they often wait until the disease has progressed to a certain extent before going to the doctor.
They are also more inclined to doctors who like to "take strong medicine" and think that these doctors are "good" and help them "solve problems" as soon as possible.
But in fact, "strong medicine" often leads to drug resistance and overtreatment. This attitude of emphasizing treatment over prevention has made many poor people not only more economically strained, but also physically devastated. This in turn affects the education of the next generation - according to research, children with poor physical condition tend to attend school for shorter periods of time and have relatively low salaries after graduation. Poverty is "inherited" in this way.
In terms of financial management, Banerjee's research also reveals the phenomenon of interest rate inversion. Poor people often need to borrow small loans, short-term loans, and then pay extremely high interest.
The reason is also that the poor tend to have higher financial risks - they often have unstable incomes and cannot obtain working capital from banks, so they are more dependent on these high-interest microloans. And these microloans make it even less difficult for them to have savings to protect against risk.
Through their research, you may understand why poverty is so difficult to overcome.
So how can we make a class leap from poverty to middle class? The Banerjees also gave their solution.
For example, self-employed entrepreneurship is a way.
But in the same way, for the extremely poor, it is difficult to obtain the principal needed to start a business. A more practical option is often the work of government agencies. Because relatively speaking, job opportunities in governments are very stable, which will give the poor the opportunity to make long-term investments, increase their thinking "bandwidth", and then realize the leap from poverty to middle class.
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Significance for China
Banerjee's research is also of great significance for China.
Because China is also a developing country, there are also some people who are in poverty and anxiety. People often think that to defeat poverty, radical reforms are necessary. Banerjee thinks it's very difficult and doesn't need to.
On the contrary, improving the current system can often bring good results and increase people's trust in the government, which is the same view as the 2017 Nobel laureate Saylor: small changes can have a big impact.
Proportion of BRICS countries in extreme poverty to total population (red line is China)
So, what role can the government play in this?
In fact, the government is used to solve problems that the market cannot solve. The problem of the poor is precisely because of market failures that the government has become particularly important.
Poor people often lack the necessary information to make the right decisions, and poor people often have too many responsibilities to survive, resulting in the inability to make optimal decisions.
In this sense, Banerjee's research provides governments with a new perspective on understanding poverty, so as to alleviate poverty from a policy perspective and ultimately find opportunities to overcome it.
This year's Nobel Prize, unlike the past focus on basic research and academic contributions, is more pragmatic, which seems to indicate an increasingly obvious trend: current scientific research is paying more and more attention to the impact of research on the real world.
In line with China's common saying, science and technology are the primary productive forces.
Nobel Prize selectors may also hope that in the future, research can break through the shackles of ivory towers more and become a concrete object in your hands, truly used by the people. |
Posted on 10/16/2019 4:15:04 PM
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Posted on 10/16/2019 4:23:33 PM