TED2010: Ten fascinating people you've never heard of. 1. Esther Duflo, poverty economist

A 37-year-old MacArthur "genius" award winner, and professor at MIT, Esther Duflo sidesteps the grand armchair debate about whether charitable aid to poor countries does more harm than good. The French economist has been a champion of using random trials, like those used for prescription drugs, to test whether some aid policies work in the real world.

Such tests have shown, for example, that giving a kilo of lentils to a family in India to get them to immunize a child against disease sharply increases the rate of immunizations. The same approach can be used to study the merits of giving out free bed nets to fight malaria and to examine ways to get children in developing countries to go to school.