Esther Duflo: the new French intellectual

The economic crisis is bad news for economists, or at least for those in the west whose orthodox recipes offered an uncritical gloss on the deceptive boom years and failed to anticipate the devastating financial meltdown that has followed. No wonder then that in this time of retrenchment and rethinking, there is also a search for fresh perspectives and voices that can propose economic solutions for the world after the crash.

It is a big responsibility to place on anyone's shoulders, let alone that of a diminutive 36-year-old woman easily mistaken for a student. But in the crucial area of finding answers to the enduring problems of poverty and development in the global south, a young left-leaning French economist named Esther Duflo is leading one of the interesting and creative currents of new economic thinking.

Esther Duflo teaches at MIT and runs a project called the Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL, whose first letter comes from the name of her Saudi sponsor, Abdul Latif Jameel). She has become so famous in France that she was invited to chair a year-long project on "knowledge against poverty" at the - almost exclusively male - cradle of Parisian intellectualism and academia, the Collège de France; her inaugural lecture on 8 January 2009 on the theme of "experiments, science and the fight against poverty" was held in front of an enthusiastic crowd which overflowed from the largest lecture-hall.