The Economist as Plumber

Esther Duflo

NBER Working Paper No. 23213
Issued in March 2017
NBER Program(s):Development Economics

As economists increasingly help governments design new policies and regulations, they take on an added responsibility to engage with the details of policy making and, in doing so, to adopt the mindset of a plumber. Plumbers try to predict as well as possible what may work in the real world, mindful that tinkering and adjusting will be necessary since our models gives us very little theoretical guidance on what (and how) details will matter. This essay argues that economists should seriously engage with plumbing, in the interest of both society and our discipline.

Acknowledgments

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Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w23213

Published: Esther Duflo, 2017. "The Economist as Plumber," American Economic Review, vol 107(5), pages 1-26.