Nobel Economics prize winner Michael Kremer thought message was a scam

The Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to Michael Kremer on October 14 along with Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee. However, when Kremer was first given the news through a Skype call, he thought it was a scam. Only when one of his friends from Sweden had informed that the person needed to speak with him urgently, did the Harvard economist realised that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his experimental approach to alleviate global poverty. The 54-year-old economist said that he has watched the world of economics change over the years to a discipline in which researchers engage more with people on the ground. 

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Poverty is not intractable

Michael Kremer also believes that global poverty might seem “intractable”, however researchers are learning all the time about what works and what does not and the governments have also become more effective in addressing the real problems. Esther Duflo is the youngest person and the second woman to win a Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2019, along with husband Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer. Kremer also believes that a lot of people these days choose to study Economics to take action against poverty. 

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Nobel Prize in Economics

The Swedish Academy announced the last set of this year’s Nobel prize which included an Indian-American. The Swedish Academy said that the winners have contributed towards the ability to fight global poverty with their work and research. “In just two decades, their new experiment-based approach has transformed development economics, which is now a flourishing field of research,” said the Academy. Over 700 million people still subsist on extremely low incomes. Every year, five million children still die before their fifth birthday, often from diseases that could be prevented or cured with relatively cheap and simple treatments,” it added. 

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(With AP inputs)