While the West threw billions at global poverty, Esther Duflo tried to solve the problem with science. It has made her France's most fêted thinker, says John LichfieldEveryone knows what a world-renowned, French intellectual looks like. There is the older sort, now rare, who has a squint and smokes cigarettes and haunts the cafés of the Paris Left Bank. There is the newer kind, who has flowing hair and an open-necked shirt and haunts television studios. Wrong and wrong again. The new face of the world-leading French intellectual is a brisk 36-year-old woman with the pleasant but no-nonsense look of a primary school teacher, who climbs mountains in her spare time. She is Esther Duflo and was recently named one of the 100 most influential thinkers in the world (she came 91st). She begins a season of lectures this week at the Collège de France, the Everest of French intellectual life: a kind of PhD-level OU with no students and free lectures for all.
Everyone knows what a world-renowned, French intellectual looks like. There is the older sort, now rare, who has a squint and smokes cigarettes and haunts the cafés of the Paris Left Bank. There is the newer kind, who has flowing hair and an open-necked shirt and haunts television studios.
Wrong and wrong again. The new face of the world-leading French intellectual is a brisk 36-year-old woman with the pleasant but no-nonsense look of a primary school teacher, who climbs mountains in her spare time.
She is Esther Duflo and was recently named one of the 100 most influential thinkers in the world (she came 91st). She begins a season of lectures this week at the Collège de France, the Everest of French intellectual life: a kind of PhD-level OU with no students and free lectures for all.
I got a pretty good idea. However, I would liked to think a translation of her op-ed or her lectures may be appearing soon. Else it's all a bit vague. keep to the Fen Causeway
or, you know, we can talk about cafe's and cigarette's some more.
Who knew?
