Even Nobel Prize winners can be pretty stupid, especially prize winners in economics. From Paul Mueller at aier.org:
Sometimes smart people make remarkably naïve or deeply problematic comments because their view of the world has been molded by narrow ideology, reinforced by significant consensus in their social circles. Recently Esther Duflo, a Nobel prize winning economist, revealed herself to be such a person. In a Financial Times interview with Simon Mundy, she said the West owed a “moral debt” of about $500 billion annually to the global south due to its contribution to climate change and the resulting harm.
I’ve questioned such a calculation elsewhere. And I am not commenting on her published economic work, some of which is no doubt decent. Instead, I want to highlight how outrageously naïve global elites, in this case within the economics profession, have become. There are three major examples of Progressive groupthink in this relatively short interview.
