This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
Human beings are always trying to make sense of the world.
When things happen to us or to our communities or in our nations, we understand those events through the lens of culture, through ideology, or through the prism of our own perspectives.
You see a homeless man on the street or a tycoon getting on a yacht.
Why is one so poor and the other so rich?
Many of us have ready answers to these questions because we've spent years or decades perfecting our preferred stories.
But what would happen if we just stopped?
If we told ourselves, you know, I might not actually have a very good handle on the world?
My theories are just that, theories.
This week on hidden brain, the story of a kid from Calcutta who became a Nobel Prize winner by asking a deceptively simple, how do you know that's true?
In 1937, Abhijit Banerjees grandfather struck a real estate deal in Calcutta.
It turned out to be a very bad deal.
Oh, my grandfather thought he was being very clever when he built his house.
He thought, well, I'm getting this plot cheap.
Not quite getting the idea that there might be a reason why he was getting cheap.
The plot of land turned out to be right on the edge of a slum.
But as we will see throughout this episode, things that sound like bad ideas can sometimes turn out well, and seemingly good ideas can turn out poorly.
Often the only way to really find out how things will unfold is to watch and see what happens.
I think my grandfather, he loved the idea of doing something dramatic and with a flourish.