Kuznets Memorial Lecture Series

The Simon Kuznets Memorial Lecture is an annual event hosted by the Yale Economic Growth Center since 1987, featuring a prominent economist speaking on issues in economic development. Since 2020, the Kuznets lecture has been combined with a mini-conference (typically the day after the lecture) that showcases cutting-edge research by early-career researchers on topics covered in the lecture. In Fall 2022, EGC launched the Kuznets Visiting Faculty Program, which brings economists to Yale for visits of 1-2 weeks.

The lecture series was founded by EGC Faculty members in 1986 to honor Simon Kuznets, who had helped found the Center. The series is dedicated to “Quantitative Aspects of the Economic Growth of Nations,” the title Kuznets gave to his pioneering series of ten short monographs that were published by Economic Development and Cultural Change between 1956 and 1967.

Born in 1901 in what is today Belarus, Kuznets helped launch the US national income statistics series in 1934. The motivation was to use data for policy – the statistics series was issued to meet the need to describe consistently and in detail the economic toll taken by the Great Depression. Post World War II, Kuznets saw a need for a center to do what his home institutions weren’t able to do – to use data to understand development. He believed Yale was the ideal home for such a venture and he worked with the chair of Yale’s economics department and Ford Foundation to set up EGC in 1961.

Kuznets went on to receive the Nobel Prize in 1971 for theoretical and empirical contributions to the measurement of economic growth, and remained a senior consultant for EGC until his death in 1985.

Esther Duflo (University of Zurich) will deliver the 36th Simon Kuznets Memorial Lecture, “Just Economics: A Better Deal for People and Planet."

Esther Duflo is the Lemann Foundation Professor in the Department of Economics, University of Zurich; the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics and the co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); and Chaire, Pauvreté et politiques publiques at the Collège de France. In her research, she seeks to understand the economic lives of the poor, with the aim to help design and evaluate social policies. She has worked on health, education, financial inclusion, environment and governance.

Professor Esther Duflo’s first degrees were in history and economics from Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris. She subsequently received a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT in 1999.

Duflo has received numerous academic honors and prizes including 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (with co-Laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer), the Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences (2015), Infosys Prize (2014), a John Bates Clark Medal (2010), and a MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship (2009). With Abhijit Banerjee, she wrote Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty and Good Economics for Hard Times. Duflo recently released the children’s book Poor Economics for Kids.

Duflo is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.