The recipients of this year's Tufts Global Development and Environment Institute (GDAE) Leontief Prize at yesterday's award ceremony in the Coolidge Room at Ballou Hall addressed the issue of mankind's well-being in times of crisis.
The 2010 Leontief Prize for Advancing Frontiers of Economic Thought was awarded to Bina Agarwal, professor of economics at the Institute of Economic Growth in Delhi University, and Daniel Kahneman, senior scholar at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics Sciences.
The Leontief Prize, awarded annually and named after Nobel Prize-winner Wassily Leontief, is intended to recognize economists whose research supports sustainable societies.
Co-Director of GDAE Neva Goodwin introduced the two award recipients, who both gave short presentations pertaining to the subject "Development and Well-being in Times of Crisis."
Agarwal delivered her lecture on food issues facing the world, noting that it was a problem that developed countries need to confront as well.
"This isn't only an issue affecting the poor in developing countries," Agarwal said. "The crisis of chronic hunger and malnutrition brings forth the fundamental question: How will the world feed itself in a sustainable way?"
Agarwal also went on to explain the importance of the major food staples like wheat and rice, noting that two-thirds of the world's poor depend on rice. She also discussed the threat that climate change posed to food security and the changing farmer demographic. "The farmer is typically small and poor, and the farmer is increasingly female," she said.
Agarwal's proposed solutions included increasing countries' internal and external cooperation, investing in agricultural infrastructure and soil and water conservation. She also suggested regional buffers and food banks, global subsidies for biofuel research and commitments to fund infrastructure research.
"Long after the financial crisis is over, the food crisis will persist," she said. "We have to ask: Is it time for a new global order? To find a solution, we need to acknowledge the poor and women not just as the main victims, but also as a significant part of the solution."
Agarwal's work focuses on gender issues, women's rights and environmental development. She serves on the United Nations Committee for Development Policy and the Indian Prime Minister's National Council for Land Reforms.
Kahneman spoke about the difference between the experiencing self and the evaluating self.
For example, when asked the question "How do you feel about your life?" during a Gallup poll, responders could either respond to how they were feeling during the current moment — the experiencing or present self — or respond with a memory that reflects their feelings about their life — the remembering or evaluating self.
This, Kahneman explained, was the difference between experiencing your life and thinking about your life. The problem, he continued, was that the way economists had been looking at data was wrong, citing as an example the traditional well-being graph.
Kahneman further noted that as GDP increases, "the rich feel stressed and the poor feel depressed," and that there was a magic number for feeling greater satisfaction with life — about $70,000.
"Money doesn't buy happiness," he said. "To increase happiness, we have to think not in terms of well-being [but] focus on misery. We need to think in social terms, not as a problem of well-being but as a problem of misery, and this will lead us to very different policies and a very different approach."
Goodwin described Kahneman as a "psychologist who claims to have never taken an economics course in his life." He in 2002 won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his work in behavioral economics.
The presentations were followed by a brief question-and-answer session in which both recipients addressed questions related to their presentations.
Previous Leontief Prize recipients include Amartya Sen, John Kenneth Galbraith and Herman E. Daly.
