Growing up in India, the sheer poverty
and inequality that I'd seen made me very interested
in trying to understand
what economics could do
and I think what I discovered during my PhD was that
you could use the tools of economics
to actually ask much more nuanced questions about
power and politics.
Why was it that some institutions
would systematically exclude certain groups
and what it would take to give
historically disadvantaged groups
political and economic power.
I'm Rohini Pande,
Professor of Economics at Yale University
And Director of the Economic Growth Center.
Central to economics is this idea
that there are tradeoffs
because we have a finite set of resources
and we have to decide how to allocate them.
Do we do it through markets and price mechanisms?
Do we do it through redistribution
through the government?
In my own work, I'm very interested
in thinking about policy as a tool of change.
How can we look at patterns in the world
to try to understand
what policies will increase equality,
what policies will lead to trade offs between
economic well-being and social justice?
And I think that's the power of economics
when it's well done,
is actually being able to quantify those tradeoffs
And repeatedly, what we heard was this concern that
if a woman or a young girl had a phone,
she would get a boyfriend.
And it seemed that there was something
linked between very much
based on the caste system,
these notions of purity
and controlling phone use of women.
We go to the field and then really talk to them
through a set of questions
to understand their economic lives, their social lives,
their preferences, their behavior.
We typically end up surveying
both a woman and her husband
because one of the things
that we're interested in is also looking at
whether on similar questions
they may have very different responses.
A women might think that a mobile phone
is appropriate for a woman to use,
but her husband may not think it is.
And that discord may be very informative
of what actually happens.
Certainly, I think a central part of economics
is the toolkit
is the way of thinking about abstraction
of how do you go from
just seeing everything
that's happening in a world
to distill it down to one force
that you can focus on
and say that was something
that affected behavior.
And I think that's something economics is very good at.
But I think it's dangerous
to take it to the next step
of saying that as a result,
we know something about what's
going to make people wealthier
or happier.
I think to understand that,
you have to have a much more nuanced view
of politics, of power.
Economics can get to that
but I think that's where a little bit
more humility and learning from other
disciplines is valuable.
Economics is also, I think,
being pushed in the right direction
by a lot of the social movements
that we are seeing around
issues of inclusion, of justice.
Economists have to think hard about
how do we actually think of notions of justice,
not just efficiency.