Why use getters and setters/accessors?

What’s the advantage of using getters and setters – that only get and set – instead of simply using public fields for those variables?

If getters and setters are ever doing more than just the simple get/set, I can figure this one out very quickly, but I’m not 100% clear on how:

public String foo;

is any worse than:

private String foo;
public void setFoo(String foo) { this.foo = foo; }
public String getFoo() { return foo; }

Whereas the former takes a lot less boilerplate code.

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