Please note: In-person registration for this event is closed. You can still register to join virtually on Zoom. Please contact us if you have any questions. 

On Tuesday, April 18, 2023, the King Center on Global Development invites you to hear Professor Krishna, the Edgar T. Thompson Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at Duke University, dispel key misconceptions about poverty. 

Drawing on 20 years of research spanning five countries and more than 40,000 surveyed households, Krishna believes that the following four myths about poverty stand in the way of more effective action: 
1. As concept and measure, poverty is a useful guide for policy and a reliable representation of people’s situations.
2. The goal of policy is to get people across the poverty line.
3. Poverty needs to be removed (we needn’t worry about its creation).
4. Many are poor for reasons of their own making.

Krishna will also review some recent work on opportunity and social mobility around the world. Lunch will be served for in-person attendees.

About the Speaker

Anirudh Krishna is the Edgar T. Thompson Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at Duke University where he has taught for the past 23 years. He received his PhD in government from Cornell University in 2000 and his master's in economics from Delhi University in 1980. 

Before returning to academia in 2000, he spent 14 years with the Indian Administrative Service, managing diverse rural and urban development initiatives. He received an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University, Sweden in 2011, the Olaf Palme Visiting Professorship from the Swedish Research Council in 2007, and the Dudley Seers Memorial Prize in 2005 and 2013. He has advised the World Bank, the United Nations, national governments, and non-government organizations. His most recent research on social mobility is described in his TEDx talk.

Professor Krishna has written several books including The Broken Ladder: The Paradox and the Potential of India’s One-Billion (Cambridge University Press and Penguin Random House India 2017), winner of the Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Book Prize and shortlisted for the inaugural Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize. In addition, he has more than 50 articles published in peer-reviewed journals and 50 other articles and book chapters.

About the Moderator

Eric Lambin, a geographer and environmental scientist, divides his time between the Université catholique de Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium) and Stanford University, where he occupies the Ishiyama Provostial Professorship at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. He is also a King Center faculty affiliate and a faculty lead of the Extreme Poverty, Infrastructure, and Climate Initiative at the King Center. His research focuses on the causes and impacts of land use changes in different parts of the world. 

He was Chair of the international scientific project Land Use and Land Cover Change (LUCC) from 1999 to 2005. He was awarded the 2009 Francqui Prize, the 2014 Volvo Environment Prize, the 2019 Blue Planet Prize, and is Foreign Associate at the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He is also a member of the European Commission’s Group of Chief Scientific Advisors. His current research tries to understand how globalization affects global land use, and how private and public regulations of land use interact to promote more sustainable land use practices.