Abhijit Banerjee sits with the Financial Times to discuss the power of storytelling in economics, his childhood in West Bengal and founding the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab in 2003. Over lunch, the FT’s John Reed remarks how Abhijit and J-PAL co-founder Esther Duflo “transformed their field by using randomised controlled trials to measure the impact of small interventions on policy outcomes for poor people.”