Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury > Recent Status Updates

"just how layered and complex plain speech could be, how many secrets wrapped in the banner of Sincerity."

"They take people and art. The math will burn, the engines melt, the arches fall to dust."

"Some days Blue wonders why anyone ever bothered making numbers so small; other days she supposes even infinity needs to start somewhere."

"Red likes to feel. It is a fetish."

"A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist or, worse, a poet."

"Without that vigilance, conversations about multifaceted problems turn into slogans and caricatures and policy analysis gets replaced by quack remedies."

"Ideas are powerful. Ideas drive change. Good economics alone cannot save us. But without it, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of yesterday. Ignorance, intuitions, ideology, and inertia combine to give us answers that look plausible, promise much, and predictably betray us. As history, alas, demonstrates over and over, the ideas that carry the day in the end can be good or bad."

"Blind economics missed the explosion in inequality all over the world, the increasing social fragmentation that came with it, and the impending environmental disaster, delaying action, perhaps irrevocably."

"Blinkered economics told us trade is good for everyone, and faster growth is everywhere. It is just a matter of trying harder and, moreover, worth all the pain it might take."

"Bad economics underpinned the grand giveaways to the rich and the squeezing of welfare programs, sold the idea that the state is impotent and corrupt and the poor are lazy, and paved the way to the current stalemate of exploding inequality and angry inertia."

"Good economics prevailed over ignorance and ideology to ensure insecticide-treated bed nets were given away rather than sold in Africa, thereby cutting childhood malaria deaths by more than half."

"Policy is powerful. Governments have the power to do enormous good but also important damage, and so do large private and bilateral donors."

"And yet as development economists we are also keenly aware that the most remarkable fact about the last forty years is the pace of change, good and bad."

"The rich and the talented step nimbly into the glittering pockets of economic success, but all too many of the rest have to hang back. This is the world that produced Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Brexit and will produce many more disasters unless we do something about it."

"Businesses shut down in Boise and show up in booming Seattle, but the workers who lost their jobs cannot afford to move to Seattle. Nor do they want to anyway, since so much of what they value— their friends and their families, their memories and their loyalties— will have to stay behind."

"The goal of social policy, in these times of change and anxiety, is to help people absorb the shocks that affect them without allowing those shocks to affect their sense of themselves."

"What is common among a drought-affected farmer in India, a youth in Chicago’s South Side, and a fifty-something white man who was just laid off? While they may have problems, they are not the problem. They are entitled to be seen for who they are and to not be defined by the difficulties besieging them."

"Essentially, they were taught to just take a minute to gauge the environment and assess the proper course of action. Participation in the program reduced the total number of arrests during the intervention period by about a third, reduced violent crime arrests by half, and increased graduation rates by around 15 percent."

"So instead of telling participants it was not the right thing to do, or punishing them when they did so, Becoming a Man asked kids from poor neighborhoods to participate in a series of activities, inspired by cognitive behavioral therapy, to help them identify when fighting was the appropriate reaction and when it might not be."

"As we saw earlier, research in education shows that children quickly internalize their place in the pecking order, and teachers reinforce it."

"This does not just affect some small sliver of the extreme poor that’s very different from the rest of us. When part of the social system conveys punishment and humiliation, it is the entire society that recoils from it."

"Putting these families squarely on track toward productive work required more than money. It required treating them as human beings with a respect they were not used to, recognizing both their potential and the damage done to them by years of deprivation."

"the enormous NGO BRAC arrived at the same conclusion. They noticed that the poorest of the poor in the villages where they worked were excluded (or self-excluded) from many of their programs."

"Second, work is not necessarily what follows after all the other problems have been solved and people are “ready,” but is part of the recovery process itself."

"First, given the right conditions, everyone can hold a job and be productive."

"They are made to understand that they should be grateful for help, even when they don’t particularly want it. Robbed of their dignity, they easily become suspicious, and this suspicion is taken for ingratitude and obstinacy, which further deepens the trap in which they are stuck."

"ATD Fourth World was founded by Joseph Wresinski, a Catholic priest, in France in the 1950s, out of the conviction that extreme poverty is not the result of the inferiority or inadequacy of a group of people, but of systematic exclusion. Exclusion and misunderstanding build on each other. The extreme poor are robbed of their dignity and their agency."

"Pierre-Antoine explained the limits of the traditional job-placement model. When people have one difficulty, it is possible to help. When people accumulate problems, they don’t conform to what regular jobs expect from them, and they often quickly give up or get rejected. What is different at TAE is that the business is designed around them."

"A program for better job transitions would be a universal right. But unlike UBI, which is just a universal right to an income, the program would link to what seems to be an integral part of social identity. We each should have a universal right to a productive life within society."

"A recent study in France showed recruiting costs are big enough to slow down hiring. Researchers teamed up with the national unemployment agency to offer recruiting assistance to firms.They posted vacancies on behalf of the firm & generated and screened promising job applications;they found that companies offered these services posted more vacancies & hired 9 percent more permanent workers than those that were not."