Abhijit Banerjee Quotes

poverty is not just a lack of money; it is not having the capability to realize one’s full potential as a human being.

the poor are no less rational than anyone else—quite the contrary. Precisely because they have so little, we often find them putting much careful thought into their choices:They have to be sophisticated economists just to survive.

We must arm ourselves with patience and wisdom and listen to the poor what they want. This is the best way to avoid the trap of ignorance, ideology and inertia on our side.

The point is simple: talking about the problems of the world without talking about some accessible solutions is the way to paralysis rather than progress.

If the rules make such a difference, then it becomes very important who gets to make them.

What is dangerous is not making mistakes, but to be so enamored of one’s point of view that one does not let facts get in the way. To make progress, we have to constantly go back to the facts, acknowledge our errors, and move

But then it is easy, too easy, to sermonize about the dangers of paternalism and the need to take responsibility for our own lives, from the comfort of our couch in our safe and sanitary home. Aren't we, those who live in the rich world, the constant beneficiaries of a paternalism now so thoroughly embedded into the system that we hardly notice it?

Awareness of our problems thus does not necessarily mean that they get solved. It may just mean that we are able to perfectly anticipate where we will fail.

there is a strong association between poverty and the level of cortisol produced by the body, an indicator of stress. And

Herd behavior generates informational cascades: the information on which the first people base their decision will have an outsized influence on what all the others believe.

ideology, ignorance, and inertia—the three Is—on the part of the expert, the aid worker, or the local policy maker, often explain why policies fail and why aid does not have the effect it should.

Economics is too important to be left to economists.

For each successful entrepreneur in the Silicon Valley or elsewhere, many have had to fail.

A combination of unrealistic goals, unnecessarily pessimistic expectations, and the wrong incentives for teachers contributes to ensure that education systems in developing countries fail their two main tasks: giving everyone a sound basic set of skills, and identifying talent.

There is always some cheap pleasant thing to tempt you.

Talking about the problems of the world without talking about some accessible solutions is the way to paralysis rather than progress.

So at the end of the day, although we will try to stitch together the best evidence for these theories, the result will be tentative. We have already seen that growth is hard to measure. It is even harder to know what drives it, and therefore to make policy to make it happen. Given that, we will argue, it may be time to abandon our profession’s obsession with growth.

And, perhaps most urgently, how can society help all those people the markets have left behind?

no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark you only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well your neighbors running faster than you breath bloody in their throats the boy you went to school with who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory is holding a gun bigger than his body you only leave home when home won’t let you stay.7

It is not easy to escape from poverty, but a sense of possibility and a little bit of well-targeted help (a piece of information, a little nudge) can sometimes have surprisingly large effects. On the other hand, misplaced expectations, the lack of faith where it is needed, and seemingly minor hurdles can be devastating. A push on the right lever can make a huge difference, but it is often difficult to know where that lever is. Above all, it is clear that no single lever will solve every problem.

The curriculum and organization of schools often date back to a colonial past, when schools were meant to train a local elite to be the effective allies of the colonial state, and the goal was to maximize the distance between them and the rest of the populace.

research in education shows that children quickly internalize their place in the pecking order, and teachers reinforce it. Teachers told that some children are smarter than others (even though they were simply chosen randomly) treat them differently, so that these children in fact do better.

Only a social policy founded on respect for the dignity of the individual can help make the average citizen more open to ideas of toleration.

The call to action is not just for academic economists—it is for all of us who want a better, saner, more humane world. Economics is too important to be left to economists.

there are no iron laws of economics keeping us from building a more humane world,

This is why political institutions matter—they exist to prevent leaders from organizing the economy for their private benefit.

In the slums of Delhi, a study found that only 34 percent of the “doctors” had a formal medical degree.

economic phenomena to show that we think about the present very differently from the way we think about the future (a notion referred to as “time inconsistency”).37 In

the present, we are impulsive, governed in large part by emotions and immediate desire:

More generally, time inconsistency is a strong argument for making it as easy as possible for people to do the “right” thing, while, perhaps, leaving them the freedom to opt

The answers to these problems take more than a tweet. So there is an urge to just avoid them. And partly as a result, nations are doing very little to solve the most pressing challenges of our time; they continue to feed the anger and the distrust that polarize us, which makes us even more incapable of talking, thinking together, doing something about them. It often feels like a vicious cycle.

Capital-scarce economies grow faster because new investment is highly productive. Rich economies, which are, in general, capital abundant, tend to grow more slowly because new investment is not as productive.

The government exists in part to solve problems no other institution can realistically tackle. To demonstrate waste in government, one needs to show there is an alternative way of organizing the same activity that works better.

For that, we need to understand what undermines trust in economists. A part of the answer is that there is plenty of bad economics around. Those who represent the “economists” in the public discourse are not usually the same people who are part of the IGM Booth panel.

the parts of the brain corresponding to the limbic system (thought to respond only to more visceral, immediate rewards) were activated only when the decision involved comparing a reward today with one in the future. In contrast, the lateral prefrontal cortex (a more “calculating” part of the brain) responded with a similar intensity to all decisions, regardless of the timing of the options. Brains that work like this would produce a lot of failed good intentions. And indeed, we do see a lot of those, from New Year’s resolutions to gym memberships that lie unused.

The bottom line is that, much as in rich countries, we have no accepted recipe for how to make growth happen in poor countries. Even the experts seem to have accepted this. In 2006, the World Bank asked the Nobel laureate Michael Spence to lead the Commission on Growth and Development (informally known as the Growth Commission). Spence initially refused, but convinced by the enthusiasm of his would-be fellow panelists, a highly distinguished group that included Robert Solow, he finally agreed. But their report ultimately recognized that there are no general principles, and no two growth episodes seem alike. Bill Easterly, not very charitably perhaps, but quite accurately, described their conclusion: “After two years of work by the commission of 21 world leaders and experts, an 11-member working group, 300 academic experts, 12 workshops, 13 consultations, and a budget of $4m, the experts’ answer to the question of how to attain high growth was roughly: we do not know, but trust experts to figure it out.

Most people believed, correctly, that most normal North Africans tended to be relatively poor and therefore unlikely to be able to afford a new car, and on the basis of that statistical association their presumption was that the individual North African driver of a nice car was a criminal. Now they assume he is an Uber driver, which is clear progress.

Additionally, there is good evidence that people particularly hate mistakes of their own making. The world is fraught with uncertainties, many of which people have no control over. These vagaries make them unhappy, but perhaps not as unhappy as making an active choice that ends up, purely as a result of bad luck, making them worse off than if they had done nothing.

After every patient left, the doctor would come outside and make a show of washing his needle with water from the drum. This was his way of signaling that he was being careful. We do not know whether he actually infected anyone with his syringe, but doctors in Udaipur talk about a particular doctor who infected an entire village with Hepatitis B by reusing the same unsterilized needle.

After the first lot of policyholders universally claimed to have lost their cattle, they decided that in order to claim that an animal had died, the owner would need to show the ear of the dead cow. The result was a robust market in cows’ ears: Any cow that died, insured or not, would have its ear cut off and the ear would then be sold to those who had insured a cow. That way they could claim the insurance and keep their cow. In

In one large US university, where roommates were assigned at random, a study found that white students who happened to end up with African American roommates were significantly more likely to endorse affirmative action, and that white students assigned roommates from any minority group were more likely to continue to interact socially with members of other ethnic groups after their first year, when they had full freedom in choosing whom to associate with.

A better conversation must start by acknowledging the deep human desire for dignity and human contact, and to treat it not as a distraction, but as a better way to understand each other, and to set ourselves free from what appear to be intractable oppositions. Restoring human dignity to its central place, we argue in this book, sets off a profound rethinking of economic priorities and the ways in which societies care for their members, particularly when they are in need.

To make matters worse, learning about health care is inherently difficult not only for the poor, but for everyone.33 If patients are somehow convinced that they need shots to get better, there is little chance that they could ever learn they are wrong. Because most diseases that prompt visits to the doctor are self-limiting (i.e., they will disappear no matter what), there is a good chance that patients will feel better after a single shot of antibiotics. This naturally encourages spurious causal associations: Even if the antibiotics did nothing to cure the ailment, it is normal to attribute any improvement to them. By contrast, it is not natural to attribute causal force to inaction: If a person with the flu goes to the doctor, and the doctor does nothing, and the patient then feels better, the patient will correctly infer that it was not the doctor who was responsible for the cure. And rather than thanking the doctor for his forbearance, the patient will be tempted to think that it was lucky that everything worked out this time but that a different doctor should be seen for future problems.This reaction creates a natural tendency to overmedicate in a private, unregulated market. This is compounded by the fact that, in many cases, the prescriber and the provider are the same person, either because people turn to their pharmacists for medical advice, or because private doctors also stock and sell medicine. It

The benefits of good nutrition may be particularly strong for two sets of people who do not decide what they eat: unborn babies and young children. In fact, there may well be an S-shaped relationship between their parent’s income and the eventual income of these children, caused by childhood nutrition. That is because a child who got the proper nutrients in utero or during early childhood will earn more money every year of his or her life: This adds up to large benefits over a lifetime. For example, the study of the long-term effect of deworming children in Kenya, mentioned above, concluded that being dewormed for two years instead of one (and hence being better nourished for two years instead of one) would lead to a lifetime income gain of $3,269 USD PPP. Small differences in investments in childhood nutrition (in Kenya, deworming costs $1.36 USD PPP per year; in India, a packet of iodized salt sells for $0.62 USD PPP; in Indonesia, fortified fish sauce costs $7 USD PPP per year) make a huge difference later on.

The only recourse we have against bad ideas is to be vigilant, resist the seduction of the “obvious,” be skeptical of promised miracles, question the evidence, be patient with complexity and honest about what we know and what we can know. Without that vigilance, conversations about multifaceted problems turn into slogans and caricatures and policy analysis gets replaced by quack remedies. The call to action is not just for academic economists—it is for all of us who want a better, saner, more humane world. Economics is too important to be left to economists.

The increasing sophistication of robots and the progress of artificial intelligence has generated considerable anxiety about what would happen to our societies if only a few people had interesting jobs and everyone else had either no work or had a horrible job, and inequality ballooned as a result. Especially if this happened because of forces largely out of their control. Tech moguls are getting desperate to find ideas to solve the problems their technologies might cause. But we don’t need to contemplate the future in order to get a sense of what happens when economic growth leaves behind the majority of a country’s citizens. This has already happened—in the United States since 1980.

Women retained more information from the training, and those who were trained by them and listened to them did in fact learn more. But most farmers did not listen. They assumed women were less able, and therefore paid less attention to them. Along the same lines, when women in Bangladesh were trained to become line managers, they were just as good as men based on an objective assessment of their leadership and technical qualities, but they were perceived as less good by their line workers. And, presumably as a result, the performance of their lines also suffered, perversely confirming the prejudice that they were worse managers.39 What started as an unjustified preference against women resulted in women actually doing worse through no fault of their own, and this reinforced their inferior status.

Good economic institutions will encourage citizens to invest, accumulate, and develop new technologies, as a result of which society will prosper. Bad economic institutions will have the opposite effects. One problem is that rulers, who have the power to shape economic institutions, do not necessarily find it in their interest to allow their citizens to thrive and prosper. They may personally be better off with an economy that imposes lots of restrictions on who can do what (that they selectively relax to their advantage), and weakening competition may actually help them stay in power. This is why political institutions matter - they exist to prevent leaders from organizing the economy for their private benefit. When they work well, political institutions put enough constraints on rulers to ensure that they cannot deviate too far from the public interest.

Generally, it is clear that things that make life less boring are a priority for the poor. This may be a television, or a little bit of something special to eat—or just a cup of sugary tea. Even Pak Solhin had a television, although it was not working when we visited him. Festivals may be seen in this light as well. Where televisions or radios are not available, it is easy to see why the poor often seek out the distraction of a special family celebration of some kind, a religious observance, or a daughter’s wedding. In our eighteen-country data set, it is clear that the poor spend more on festivals when they are less likely to have a radio or a television. In Udaipur, India, where almost no one has a television, the extremely poor spend 14 percent of their budget on festivals (which includes both lay and religious occasions). By contrast, in Nicaragua, where 58 percent of rural poor households have a radio and 11 percent own a television, very few households report spending anything on festivals.33

Statistical discrimination explains why the police in the United States justify stopping black drivers more often. And how the Hindu majoritarian government of the state of Uttar Pradesh recently explained why so many of the people “accidentally” killed by the state police (in what are called “encounter deaths”) are Muslim. There are more blacks and Muslims among criminals. In other words, what looks like naked racism does not have to be that; it can be the result of targeting some characteristic (drug dealing, criminality) that happens to be correlated with race or religion. So statistical discrimination, rather than old-fashioned prejudice—what economists call taste-based discrimination—may be the cause. The end result is the same if you are black or Muslim, though. A recent study on the impact of “ban the box” (BTB) policies on the rate of unemployment of young black men provides a compelling demonstration of statistical discrimination. BTB policies restrict employers from using application forms where there is a box that needs to be checked if you have a criminal conviction. Twenty-three states have adopted these policies in the hope of raising employment among young black men, who are much more likely to have a conviction than others and whose unemployment rate is double the national average.31 To test the effect of these policies, two researchers sent fifteen thousand fictitious online job applications to employers in New Jersey and New York City, just before and right after the states of New York and New Jersey implemented the BTB policy.32 They manipulated the perception of race by using typically white or typically African American first names on the résumés. Whenever a job posting required indicating whether or not the applicant had a prior felony conviction, they also randomized whether he or she had one. They found, as many others before them, clear discrimination against blacks in general: white “applicants” received about 23 percent more callbacks than black applicants with the same résumé. Unsurprisingly, among employers who asked about criminal convictions before the ban, there was a very large effect of having a felony conviction: applicants without a felony conviction were 62 percent more likely to be called back than those with a conviction but an otherwise identical résumé, an effect similar for whites and blacks. The most surprising finding, however, was that the BTB policy substantially increased racial disparities in callbacks. White applicants to BTB-affected employers received 7 percent more callbacks than similar black applicants before BTB. After BTB, this gap grew to 43 percent. The reason was that without the actual information about convictions, the employers assumed all black applicants were more likely to have a conviction. In other words, the BTB policy led employers to rely on race to predict criminality, which is of course statistical discrimination.

It might therefore be better for the decentralization to be designed by a centralized authority, with the interest of the less advantaged or less powerful in mind. Power to the people, but not all the power.

I graduated from high school and couldn’t find a job, which is when I decided to set up as a doctor.

Parents are not alone in focusing their expectations on success at the graduation exam: The whole education system colludes with them. The curriculum and organization of schools often date back to a colonial past, when schools were meant to train a local elite to be the effective allies of the colonial state, and the goal was to maximize the distance between them and the rest of the populace.

If the teachers and the parents do not believe that the child can cross the hump and get into the steep part of the S—curve, they may as well not try: The teacher ignores the children who have fallen behind and the parent stops taking interest in their education. But this behavior creates a poverty trap even where none exists in the first place.

The poor stay poor here because they do not save enough.

For example, people who don’t know how to drive may nevertheless want to drive their car. But society feels that it is better if they don’t, because of what it means for the rest of us. A free market in driver’s licenses obviously cannot solve this problem.

found that, on average, teachers gave significantly lower grades to lower-caste students when they could see their caste than when they could not. But

The lower-caste teachers were actually more likely to assign worse grades to lower-caste students. They

Many people would also agree with Amartya Sen, the economist-philosopher and Nobel Prize Laureate, that poverty leads to an intolerable waste of talent. As he puts it, poverty is not just a lack of money; it is not having the capability to realize one’s full potential as a human being.

Henry Ford was the son of an Irish immigrant. Steve Jobs’s biological father was from Syria, Sergey Brin was born in Russia. Jeff Bezos takes his name from his stepfather, the Cuban immigrant Mike Bezos.

By now, there seems to be a consensus among a large majority of economists that low taxes on high earners are not guaranteed to, on their own, bring about economic growth. This was reflected in the response of the IGM Booth panel of top economists to the Trump tax cut of 2017. The tax cut provides deep and durable tax cuts for businesses, including a cut in the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. The bill also includes a new top tax rate of 37 percent for the wealthiest Americans (down from 39.6 percent), raises the threshold for top earners, and eliminates the estate tax. It has much smaller tax cuts for the rest of the population, and most of these are meant to be temporary. To the question “If the US enacts a tax bill similar to those currently moving through the House and Senate—and assuming no other changes in tax or spending policy—US GDP will be substantially higher a decade from now than under the status quo” only one person agreed with the statement and 52 percent either disagreed or strongly disagreed (the rest were uncertain or did not answer).58

That unregulated automation could be bad for workers is also the instinct of most Americans on the right and the left. One place, remarkably, where Republican and Democrat poll respondents agree is in their opposition to letting companies decide how much to automate. Eighty-five percent of Americans would support limiting automation to “dangerous and dirty jobs,” with no difference between Democrats and Republicans. Even when the question is posed in a more politically pointed way, asking whether “there should be limits on the number of jobs businesses can replace with machines, even if they are better and cheaper than humans,” 58 percent of Americans, including half of Republicans, say yes.

For some of these reasons, we suspect the current drive toward replacing human actions with robots cannot be prevented from taking a serious toll on the already dwindling stock of desirable jobs for low-skilled workers, first in the rich countries but very soon everywhere.

In the United States, the top marginal tax rate was above 90 percent from 1951 to 1963. It declined afterward, but remained high. Under Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush, top tax rates came down from 70 percent to less than 30 percent. Bill Clinton pushed them back up, but only to 40 percent. Since then they have bounced up and down, as the US presidency passes between Democrats and Republicans, but they have never gone much higher than 40 percent.

There will be a poverty trap whenever the scope for growing income or wealth at a very fast rate is limited for those who have too little to invest but expands dramatically for those who can invest a bit more. On the other hand, if the potential for fast growth is high among the poor, and then tapers off as one gets richer, there is no poverty trap.

The gap in performance between private- and public school students was close to ten times the average gap between the children from the highest and lowest socioeconomic categories.

Some firms have more employees than they need while others are unable to hire. Some entrepreneurs with great ideas may not be able to finance them, while others who are not particularly good at what they are doing continue operating: this is what macroeconomists call misallocation.

there is no compelling evidence to date of real economic responses to tax rates at the top of the income distribution.”57 By now, there seems to be a consensus among a large majority of economists that low taxes on high earners are not guaranteed to, on their own, bring about economic growth.

the insatiable greed of the capitalist class in the pursuit of more and more capital will drive the return on capital into the ground (in Marxist parlance this is called the “falling rate of profit”) and precipitate the crises that eventually end capitalism.31

In Ethiopia, a study found that just applying for a midlevel clerical job took several days and repeated journeys. Each application cost the would-be applicant a tenth of the monthly wage he would earn and had a very low probability of leading to a hire, one reason why few people applied.40 For this reason, in the case of lower-paid workers, firms often skip the interview and rely on the recommendation of someone they trust.

Evidence from other studies in Ethiopia suggests 56 percent of firms insist on work experience even for blue-collar jobs,42 and it is also common to ask for a referral from an employer.43

According to a Pew Research Center study,47 61 percent of Americans are in favor of a government policy offering all Americans a guaranteed income that would meet their basic needs in case robots become capable of doing most human jobs. Among Democrats, 77 percent are in favor. Among Republicans, 38 percent are in favor. Sixty-five percent of Democrats (but only 30 percent of Republicans) say the government has a responsibility to help displaced workers, even if it involves raising taxes.

A study found that when workers with long tenure get fired during mass layoffs, they are more likely to die in the years immediately afterward.54 Losing a job seems to literally give people heart attacks.

an experiment conducted in Peru shows boarding-school students who were randomly assigned beds near highly sociable students gained social skills themselves. In contrast, being assigned a neighboring student with good test scores did not help them get better grades.63

The endless repetition whips people into a frenzy (much like the way political demonstrations use repeated chants), making it harder for them to stop and check the stories.

Paternalism, once a feature of the large corporations that demanded loyalty but took care of their own, is now restricted to elite workers in software companies, and is expressed in the form of free food and dry cleaning in exchange for long hours.

Clearly education is in part a product of the effectiveness of the government in running schools and funding education. A government good at delivering education is probably good at other things as well; maybe the roads are better in the same countries where teachers show up to work. If we find growth is faster where education is higher, it could be due to these other policies it tends to be bundled with. And of course it is likely that people feel more committed to educating their children when the economy is doing well, so perhaps growth causes education, and not just the other way around.

If government-sector jobs are so much more valuable than private-sector jobs, but also very scarce, it is worthwhile for everybody to wait around and queue for those jobs. If the process of queuing and screening entails, as it often does, taking some exams, people may spend most of their working lives (or as much as they are allowed to by their families, anyway) studying for those exams. If the government jobs stopped being quite so desirable, the economy would gain many years of productive labor, wasted in the pursuit of the mostly unattainable

Indeed, on Facebook, 99.91 percent of the two billion people on it belong to the “giant component,” meaning that almost everyone is everyone else’s friend of a friend of a friend.67 There are only about 4.7 “degrees of separation” (the number of “nodes” you have to cross) between any two people in the giant component. This implies that in principle we could easily be exposed to pretty much everyone’s views as they travel through the social network.

The most effective way to combat prejudice may not be to directly engage with people’s views, natural as that might seem. Instead, it may be to convince citizens it is worth their while to engage with other policy issues.

people’s sense of self-worth is related to their position in the groups they see themselves as part of—their neighborhoods, their peers, their country. If this were true, inequality would of course directly affect well-being.

Interestingly, the urge to show off is less strong when people feel good about themselves. The experimenters found that simply writing a short essay describing a moment when the person did something she or he was proud of reduced the demand for platinum cards. This creates a vicious cycle, with people who feel economically vulnerable being particularly eager to demonstrate their worth through useless purchases they can ill-afford, and an industry all too ready to provide these services for a handsome fee.

we realized the problems facing the rich countries in the world were actually often eerily familiar to those we are used to studying in the developing world—people left behind by development, ballooning inequality, lack of faith in government, fractured societies and polity, and so on. We learned a lot in the process, and it did give us faith in what we as economists have learned best to do, which is to be hard headed about the facts,

What the most recent research has to say, it turns out, is often surprising, especially to those used to the pat answers coming out of TV “economists” and high school textbooks. It can shed new light on those debates.

Some, too beholden to some orthodoxy to pay attention to any fact that does not square with it, repeat old ideas like a mantra, even though they have long been disproved.

What these two examples (the nurses and the school committees) illustrate is that large-scale waste and policy failure often happen not because of any deep structural problem but because of lazy thinking at the stage of policy design.

What matters is not just how many smart people you work with, but also how many smart people you are competing with, or just happen to be around in the Valley as a whole. Silicon Valley, in Romer’s theory, is what it is because it brings together the best minds of the world in an environment where they can cross-pollinate each other.

It is easy to forget, especially in a crisis, the need to protect as far as possible the dignity of those being helped.

To make matters worse, those especially intimidated by the complexity of the sign-up process are often the neediest. In Delhi, widows and divorced women living in poverty are entitled to a monthly pension of Rs 1,500 (or $85 PPP, adjusting for the cost of living), a substantial amount for these women, but take-up is low: a World Bank survey found that two-thirds of eligible women were not enrolled in the program.4 One reason may be the application process, which involves a complex set of rules most people would not understand or be able to navigate.

poverty makes people (permanently) more impatient.

The enterprises of the poor often seem more a way to buy a job when a more conventional employment opportunity is not available than a reflection of a particular entrepreneurial urge.

views on these issues are all too often based entirely on the affirmation of specific personal values (“I am for immigration because I am a generous person,” “I am against immigration because migrants threaten our identity as a nation”). And when they are bolstered by anything, it is by made-up numbers and very simplistic readings of the facts. Nobody really thinks very hard about the issues themselves. This is really quite disastrous,

More generally, looking back, it is quite clear that many of the important successes of the last few decades were the direct result of a policy focus on those particular outcomes, even in some countries that were and have remained very poor. For example, a massive reduction in under-five mortality took place even in some very poor countries that were not growing particularly fast, largely thanks to a focus on newborn care, vaccination, and malaria prevention.125 And it is no different with many of the other levers for fighting poverty, be it education, skills, entrepreneurship, or health.We need a focus on the key problems and an understanding of what works to address them.

It is not easy to escape from poverty, but a sense of possibility and a little bit of well-targeted help (a piece of information, a little nudge) can sometimes have surprisingly large effects. On the other hand, misplaced expectations, the lack of faith where it is needed, and seemingly minor hurdles can be devastating. A push on the right lever can make a huge difference, but it is often difficult to know where that lever is.

no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark you only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well your neighbors running faster than you breath bloody in their throats the boy you went to school with who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory is holding a gun bigger than his body you only leave home when home won’t let you stay.

Even if people remain employed, this leads to an increase in inequality, with higher wages at the top and everyone else pushed to jobs requiring no specific skills; jobs where wages and working conditions can be really bad. This accentuates a trend that has taken place since the 1980s. Workers without a college education have increasingly been pushed out of mid-skill jobs, such as clerical and administrative roles, into low-skill tasks, such as cleaning and security.

For a combination of these two reasons, if you plotted the wages of nonmigrants in cities against the share of migrants in cities, you would find a nice upward-sloping line; the more migrants, the higher the wages.

Even if the total number of jobs does not fall, the current wave of automation tends to displace jobs that require some skills (bookkeepers and accountants) and increase the demand, either for very skilled workers (software programmers for the machines) or for totally unskilled workers (dog walkers, for example), which are both much more difficult to replace with a machine. As software engineers become richer, they have more money to hire dog walkers, who have become relatively cheaper over time, since there is little alternative employment for those with no college education. Even if people remain employed, this leads to an increase in inequality, with higher wages at the top and everyone else pushed to jobs requiring no specific skills; jobs where wages and working conditions can be really bad. This accentuates a trend that has taken place since the 1980s. Workers without a college education have increasingly been pushed out of mid-skill jobs, such as clerical and administrative roles, into low-skill tasks, such as cleaning and security.

Therefore, the monopolist will tend to focus more on cost-cutting innovations, which will increase its profit margins. In contrast, a competitive firm might go for a moonshot to try to take over the market.

During the run-up to the 2014 election for prime minister that he won in a landslide, Narendra Modi in India managed to be at many rallies at the same time by using full-scale, three-dimensional holograms that many voters took to be real. He also managed to be at more than one place in ideological terms. To the generation of globally connected ambitious young urban Indians, he was the embodiment of political modernization (emphasizing innovation, venture capital, and a slick pro-business attitude, and so on); the new entrants into the expanding middle class saw him as the one most likely to uphold their vision of nationalism rooted in Hindu tradition; for the economically threatened upper castes, he was the rampart against the (largely imagined) growing influence of Muslims and lower castes. If members of these groups had met together and each had been asked to describe “their” Modi, their answers would probably have been largely unrecognizable to the others. But the networks in which these three groups operated were sufficiently separate that there was no need for internal consistency.