There’s no silver bullet. You cannot helicopter people out of poverty.

The remark encapsulates Esther Duflo’s evidence-driven view of development: poverty is not typically solved by a single dramatic intervention (“no silver bullet”), nor by one-off rescues that ignore local constraints and long-run incentives (“helicopter people out of poverty”). It points to poverty’s structural and behavioral dimensions—health, education, credit, gender norms, governance, and risk—where small frictions can keep households trapped. The line also signals skepticism toward grand, universal theories of aid in favor of incremental, tested policies (often evaluated via randomized controlled trials) that address specific bottlenecks and can be scaled when they work.