Esther and Abhijit

August 3rd, 2018

No blog of our year in France could ever be complete without an entire entry devoted to Esther and Abhijit.  I dare say that our year would not have happened without them, and even if we could have managed, it would have been more difficult, less productive, less delicious, less interesting, and much less fun.  

I am tempted to just start enumerating the many ways they have enabled and eased and enriched our year, to protect against leaving anything out.  I feel, though, that I must do better and try to insert a little narrative substance.  

So I start many decades ago, before I knew either of them.  Esther, a Parisian child of 14 or so accompanied her mathematician father on a visit to MIT.  Something about the culture and the atmosphere of MIT appealed to her and she vowed to return.  Some years later, Glenn and I came back to MIT to teach, at about the same time that Abhijit arrived.  And then soon after, Esther's vowed return occurred when she started as a PhD student in the department.  This is where I met Esther.  We played squash and went to lunch and talked about career plans.  Esther loved MIT, but her return to France was always "two, maybe three, years away."  She was happy for her time at MIT and what she was able to accomplish professionally there that she could not have in France.  Still, though, she was a Parisienne, and anticipated the lifestyle and the food and the family connections that her return to Paris would bring.  She would just stay at MIT a little bit longer to reap a few more benefits before her repatriation.  Long story short, the "two, maybe three, years" turned into a faculty position at MIT, and then tenure at MIT, and then establishment (with Abhijit and Ben Olken) of the Poverty Action Lab there, and then marriage to Abhijit, and .... Twenty plus years later, to our great joy, she remains at MIT and is in it for the long haul, at this point.  

But of course one of the incomparable benefits of this career we have chosen in academic economics is the opportunity we have to travel, the flexibility we have to work almost anywhere, and the great gift of sabbatical every seven years.  So, even though she has remained at MIT, Esther has always kept one foot firmly planted in France, now owning part of an apartment in Paris and house in Provence, setting up an outpost of the Poverty Action Lab here in Paris, teaching her children French, and traveling back regularly to give talks, attend conferences, and serve on boards and committees. 

You might notice that almost the entire post has been about Esther.  I do not want to shortchange Abhijit---I will get back to him in a moment---but I do this for two reasons.  First, I want to offer context for how we found ourselves in Paris this year and how Esther has been so helpful, but I also want to continue on an informal theme that my blog has taken on over the year, "amazing women I know."  And Esther is truly amazing.  She accomplishes more than almost any two or three people combined that I could name, and she does it with an abundance of grace and humility and ease.  I do not have a model for how she can produce so much high-quality research, be a brilliant teacher, advisor, and mentor to many, co-run an international network of research labs with combined staff in the hundreds, be editor-in-chief of the world's most prestigious economics journal, co-run a household with two small children, and still be a good and generous friend to so many.  I could not be luckier to count her among mine.  

Esther's first contribution to this year was her suggestion that we try to arrange a visit at PSE.  We had started to think about our sabbatical and were weighing a number of options:  London, Oxford, Toulouse, Rome, Barcelona, etc.  When I found out that she and Abhijit would be visiting PSE, I immediately emailed my friend Katia to start the ball rolling.  (Esther, simultaneously, put in a good word for us.)  She also wrote a letter of recommendation for us (yes, for Glenn and me!) when Kate applied to her school EJM.  (Probably Kate could have gotten accepted on her own merits, but I'm sure that Esther wrote us a very nice letter.)  Esther suggested neighborhoods where we might like to live (Abhijit vetoed the 15th), and Esther pointed us to a particular website, book-a-flat.com, where we found our spectacular apartment.  Esther, as I suggested, is a remarkably busy person, but she still found time to help with emergency French translations of contracts and leases and applications in the months leading up to our departure.  Once we all arrived, she walked us through the procedure of booking tennis courts, conferred with us on our visa applications, introduced us to friends, advocated for us in various PSE matters, invited us to the circus, bought Kate clever and accessible French books, .... I could go on and on.

But I promised a discussion of Abhijit, too!  Like Esther, he also is a brilliant and productive economist and a first-rate intellect.  Outside of economics, he has a formidable set of skills and interests that serve, from our perspective at least, as a very useful complement to Esther's.  Where Esther's knowledge of French bureaucracy can help us negotiate our cartes de sejour, Abhijit's knowledge of local bakeries can steer us towards an unforgettable gateau au chocolat.  Where Esther figures out the intricacies of the Paris Tennis website, Abhijit makes sure that we book a court at least once a week for a game of doubles.  Esther's sober appraisal of the subtle differences in French and US technical education is punctuated by Abhijit's claim that he has just found the World's Worst Shower in the basement of PSE or that the food at a particular restaurant is Utterly Inedible or that continuous-time models are the Single Worst Thing that has ever happened to economic theory, or some other bit of similarly entertaining hyperbole.  

And finally, Esther's skills in organizing dinner parties dovetail nicely with Abhijit's wonderful taste in food and drink and his amazing skill in the kitchen.  We have eaten many dinners at their apartment this year, and each has been spectacular.  I especially love Abhijit's spiced nectarines, his citrus fennel salad, and his Indian street food potatoes.  (I also recall a wonderful marinated cheese and a roast leg of lamb that Esther made.)          

So, as you can see, it has been very important to have both of them here.

I really cannot begin to describe all of the wonderful moments we have shared and how grateful we are for their friendship.  Of everything we have done together this year, though, I decided that our regular doubles matches were most emblematic of the year.  Here we are before our final match.  (Abhijit and I took on Glenn and Esther, as you can certainly ascertain from the coordinated shirts.  I think we won, but who's keeping score?)