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Home Front: Politix
Renowned French economist to join Obama's team
2013-01-07
[FRANCE24] La Belle France's Esther Duflo, a star economist who was once named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world, has been nominated by US President Barack Obama
Ready to Rule from Day One...
to help shape US global development policy.

La Belle France's Esther Duflo, a world renowned economist, has been nominated by US President Barack Obama to join a government body dedicated to advising the administration on global development policy.

Called the Global Development Council, the group was founded by Obama in 2010 to help shape US development efforts abroad.

While Duflo's nomination will likely be viewed with a sense of pride in La Belle France, it comes as Obama's leadership continues to be dogged by unflattering comparisons in the media to European-style socialism. Just Friday, the cover of financial news magazine The Economist depicted Obama wearing a beret, red neckerchief and a striped mariner shirt, under a headline that read "America turns European". The article criticised the country's recent fiscal-cliff deal as "lousy", saying its mismanagement bore striking similarities to the "mess in the euro zone".
Posted by:Fred

#12  Highly regarded as a leading Social Economist.

NRO - I think that this is another straw in the wind signaling the transformation of the quantitative social sciences into somewhat more experimental disciplines.

The Atlantic - Much of the work that we now think of as economics, political science and other social sciences will likely be displaced by some hybrid of biology, experimental economics, psychology and other fields that can evaluate hypotheses for the quantified prediction of human behavior through structured falsification tests... Even in its current embryonic form, experimental economics already suffers from excessive rhetorical generalization from what some specific group of college sophomores did with $30 to fairly grand statements about human nature... This new approach will dominate what we now think of as classical economics. This will likely not address a lot of territory now covered in economics, including, for example, many of the issues related to the stimulus debates. These kinds of topics will of course remain interesting, and work will still be done on them in an academic setting; it will simply be even more obviously non-science, and be done down the hall in the history, philosophy and literature departments.
Posted by: mossomo   2013-01-07 17:15  

#11  They couldn't find a Chinaman?
Posted by: Ebbang Uluque6305   2013-01-07 16:30  

#10  I suppose robert mugabe was too ill to accept the position.
Posted by: Bright Pebbles   2013-01-07 16:22  

#9  A French economist? Yeah, that's what we need (sarc)
Posted by: JohnQC   2013-01-07 12:03  

#8  Detroit = Mukumburo - Michigan = Mashonaland Central ...
Posted by: Au Auric   2013-01-07 10:30  

#7  The city names have yet to be changed, but we are Zim.
Posted by: Besoeker   2013-01-07 10:19  

#6  Esther Duflo (born October 25, 1972) is a French economist, Co-Founder and Director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, and Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Duflo is an NBER Research Associate, serves on the board of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD),and is Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research's development economics program.

Her research focuses on microeconomic issues in developing countries, including household behavior, education, access to finance, health, and policy evaluation. Together with Abhijit Banerjee, Dean Karlan, Michael Kremer, John A. List, and Sendhil Mullainathan, she has been a driving force in advancing field experiments as an important methodology to discover causal relationships in economics.


Her research focuses on microeconomic issues in developing countries

Well, at least her appointment implies what status we will have in the world under The Big O.

Zimbabwe, here we come...
Posted by: Au Auric   2013-01-07 10:16  

#5  ...not counting the semi-official 'protection' tax.
Posted by: Procopius2k   2013-01-07 09:56  

#4  Don't dis the Russians Steve. Given the 13% flat individual income tax, 15% tax on dividends and maximum 20% corporate income tax it may be almost time to consider Russia a relocation option.
Posted by: AzCat   2013-01-07 06:54  

#3  A renowned French economist. From France. The country that is such an economic success that its citizens are moving to Russia. Hey, isn't John Kerry French? The plot thickens...
Posted by: SteveS   2013-01-07 01:36  

#2  Lovely! A French academic twist to community organizing, they've had it so right for so long. Will carpaccio soon be added to BBQ'd wings as an allowable EBT expenditure? Will Duflo also suggest the top 2 percent be required to pay a bit more in taxes.....say 75% ?

Posted by: Besoeker   2013-01-07 01:24  

#1  Dat basically was said on FOX NEWS' "THE FIVE", I.E. THAT IN FORMALLY PASSING THE ANTI-DEADLINE, OBAMA-BOEHNER "FISCAL CLIFF DEAL" THE US GOVT. HAS VOTED TO "BECOME LIKE EUROPE"???
Posted by: JosephMendiola   2013-01-07 00:22  

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