Interessante "profile " da economista francesa Esther Duflo. Como tem sido a regra: a França continua a produzir ótimos economistas, que, por razões que desconheço, acabam emigrando para os USA.
"Everyone knows what a world-renowned, French intellectual looks like. There is the older sort, now rare, who has a squint and smokes cigarettes and haunts the cafés of the Paris Left Bank. There is the newer kind, who has flowing hair and an open-necked shirt and haunts television studios.
Wrong and wrong again. The new face of the world-leading French intellectual is a brisk 36-year-old woman with the pleasant but no-nonsense look of a primary school teacher, who climbs mountains in her spare time.
She is Esther Duflo and was recently named one of the 100 most influential thinkers in the world (she came 91st). She begins a season of lectures this week at the Collège de France, the Everest of French intellectual life: a kind of PhD-level OU with no students and free lectures for all.
Mme Duflo is the youngest woman ever to be asked to lecture at this prestigious, 500-year-old institution at the heart of the Left Bank. Her introductory talk was the hottest (free) ticket in town. Several hundred people, including the former prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, arrived too late and were locked out.
Mme Duflo is a "development economist" one of the world's greatest experts – perhaps the greatest – on why development programmes in poor countries often fail and why they sometimes succeed. Her precise field of expertise has existed less than a decade. She is among its inventors."
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