窮 人 的 經濟 學 如何 終結 貧窮

There are five key takeaways from Poor Economics, with regard to any localized campaigns attempting to improve the lives of the poor:

1) Individuals/communities inherently believe that outside organizations/companies claiming to help their economic/health statuses do not make true claims. Info campaigns must educate the poor on critical facts/information, and this information must come from a legitimate & reliable source (i.e. the press) AND must be attractive (e.g. presented in a TV drama).

2) The poor bear responsibility for most/all aspects of their lives. Unlike individuals in the First World or people in the middle- and upper-classes, the poor do not have direct access to proper banking or credit institutions, government aid, etc. Certain institutional/Institutional changes must be made to give the poor better access to these resources (e.g. ease access to banks or offer savings accounts as default options).

3) There are good and legitimate reasons that some markets are missing for the poor or face unfavorable prices in certain markets. This provides the opportunity for technology or institutional organizations to develop a market (such as the case for microcredit lending). Local and national governments need to create conditions to allow such markets to emerge, of course.

4) It should not be assumed that poor countries are destined to fail because they are or have been poor, or that it's because of a long-running history with failure. The failure can be solved through an overhaul of public policy, greater monitoring of workers and politicians, and greater education & involvement of the people themselves within this public sphere.

5) Expectations matter. If we expect people to fail, then they will fail based on the low expectations expected of them and consequently low expectations they expect for themselves. In order to create changes in the lives of the poor, expectations must be changed.

On average, the poor people live on 99 cents per day. The fact which is shocking by itself also puts them at a great disadvantage because of a lack of resources and knowledge. To alleviate global poverty, we need to learn how their lives look like to the choices they make so that the government can frame policies in a way that doesn't just look good on paper, but they work practically too.

From their research in the Poverty Action lab along with fieldwork, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo do an outstanding job of explaining the behavior of poor people and reason for their status quo. They use conclusions and evidence drawn from the randomized control trial to explain the steps that can be taken to steer them on the right course.

This book reads like a textbook that combines the research work illustrated using graphs with anecdotes in a very interesting manner. As I said before, I did not know of this subject, but reading this book has opened my perspective about looking at poverty. You don't need an economics background to understand the insights from the book so I highly recommend reading it!

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Scott Fitzgerald may have observed "that [the very rich] are different from you and me," but many believe the same about the very poor.

Billions of dollars have been committed to eradicating global poverty, defined here as living on the purchasing power parity equivalent of $1 a day. Two public policy economists have articulated strenuously about the big picture questions - such as "what ultimately caused poverty?" (A grossly simplified explanation follows.) The End of Poverty by Jeffrey D. Sachs advocated for foreign aid to enable impoverished nations to leap out of their "poverty trap" caused by endemic problems (such as climatic conditions leading to tropical diseases and infertile farmland). With books like The Elusive Quest for Growth, William Easterly argued that foreign aid is detrimental because poverty traps do not exist. What these countries need is for their markets to become free so that people can find their own solutions to their problems.

Poor Economics was written by two more economists -- Banerjee and Duflo ("B&D") -- who asserted that the two ideological camps, both highly influential in international policy circles, had failed to address a more crucial question:

Do we know of effective ways to help the poor?

The poor often resist the wonderful plans we think up for them because they do not share our faith that those plans work, or work as well as we claim.

B&D have a much different perspective about those who are nearly penniless and claim that past policies have failed because of the 3 I of ideology, ignorance, and inertia. In the first half of Poor Economics, they examined hunger, health, education, and family size from the viewpoints of the penurious. The second half scrutinized the institutional services that are (un)available such as loans, savings accounts, and government safety nets such as unemployment benefits.

We have the same desires and weaknesses; the poor are no less rational than anyone else -- quite the contrary. Precisely because they have so little, we often find them putting much careful thought into their choices: They have to be sophisticated economists just to survive.

The poor seem to be trapped by the same kinds of problems that afflict the rest of us -- lack of information, weak beliefs, and procrastination among them.

Yet our lives are as different as liquor and licorice. And this has a lot to do with aspects of our own lives that we take for granted and hardly think about [such as no need to purify our piped-in water, deal with our sewage, worry about advice from our board-certified doctors...]. In other words, we rarely need to draw upon our limited endowment of self-control and decisiveness, while the poor are constantly required to do so.

Not only do the poor lead riskier lives than the less poor, but a bad break of the same magnitude is likely to hurt them more.

Though Poor Economics is a decade old, the concepts remain relevant especially since the Covid-19 pandemic has pushed an estimated 150 million more people into extreme poverty (see https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/po...). And because some parts deal with behavioral economics, their applicability to the poor even in higher income nations will also become apparent to the thoughtful reader. I had wanted B&D, however, to include more of the results from their RCTs. And as this book was published in 2011, the ideas may not be as "radical" as they would have been then. If you're already familiar with international development issues, then you may derive limited benefit from this book. Otherwise, this is an excellent foundational resource.

I recently read an article* published in NY Times on how women economists are NOT recognized for their work when they co-author it with another a male economist. The article goes on to explain how the bias is deep entrenched in the field of economics. Recently, I was having a conversation with a friend, working in the field of finance, on the Indian economy and more particularly about the drought which has hit most states (check the second link**), and I made a reference to this book on how Indian institutions are going weak. He instantly recognized the book and told me the name of the author as Abhijit. When I told him that the book has another author named Esther, he just quipped almost spontaneously that perhaps the co-author would have just helped the other author in finishing up the main work, and perhaps that's why her name almost never shows up. Even good reads shows the author only as Abhijit V. Banerjee (if you find it changed, have it done by me).

This has nothing to do with this book, but says a lot about the field of finance and economics.

If people can make cliches and sweeping assumptions on the work of an author just on the basis of their gender, just consider how grave and ignorant their assumptions would be on the topic of poverty, which most of us just read, see and empathize about, but never have underwent it ourselves, or have studied about it from the ground. This books helps one to break all such cliches, rhetoric and generalizations, and provides an honest account and solutions to what goes on in the ground reality.

Very Highly Recommended!

* NY Times article - (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/ups...)

** About the drought on India - http://indianexpress.com/article/opin...

The big five lessons from the authors are:
1. The poor lack information (so tell them the truth artfully)
2. The poor lack control and day-to-day life is more difficult for them (so make good behaviors as easy as possible)
3. The poor get poorer: free market institutions like banks don't work well for people with no money (so make necessary things and opportunities cheap or free)
4. Poor countries are not doomed (so do things that are proven to work)
5. Expectations can be self-fulfilling (so start positive feedback loops)
This doesn't sound new to me. This sounds like basic public health.

The book delivers some valuable information about very specific questions like whether it's effective to give away bed nets to prevent malaria. The answer is yes. But even this message is muddled with much back and forth about political theory and academic hedging.

Much of the book is about economic theories and debates between the left and right. A lot of it is anecdotal. Much of what is data-based comes from their "18-country data set" but all those 18 countries are poor. This violates the basic logic of epidemiological studies or randomized trials (RCTs), i.e. a 2X2 table with +/- input and +/- outcome. None of these countries has the relevant outcome of Rich. It is hard to learn from a data set like this what makes countries Rich vs. Poor. For that, it is much more worthwhile to read the works of Ha-Joon Chang, who writes about how South Korea went from starving mess to high-tech powerhouse.

The phrase "purchasing power parity" is repeated every time a dollar amount is converted from another currency. This is insanely irritating. That sort of thing can be said once at the beginning of the book. Such a high degree of precision in language is unnecessary or even misleading, because often these dollar amounts are referring to GIGO calculations.

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In the paperback edition the title was changed to happy-go-lucky "Poor economics: Barefoot Hedge-fund Managers, DIY Doctors and the Surprising Truth about Life on Less Than $1 a Day".

And for a reason.

This informative, well-meaning and acclaimed book is telling us that fighting poverty is just about little tweaks in the way NGOs run their programmes in developing countries. Tweaks based on the findings of - lo and behold - social psychology and econometrics. For example, remember to give food to the mothers when they bring their children to your vaccine centre.

I cannot think of anything more conservative than this - which explains the award from Goldman Sachs/FT.

A more appropriate title for the book could be "Development without even thinking of challenging the status quo" or "No wealth redistribution: guaranteed".

If you think that a 13% increase in the income of someone who earns $1 a day is a good result, this book will provide you with very useful tips.

(A rumbling sound is heard as ninety percent of the people reading this review frantically jiggle their mice in an effort to click another link on this page. Any link. Even an ad for laundry detergent.)

Ok, hello to the two remaining readers out there. Thank you for sticking around. I know ‘economics’ is one of the least sexy words in reading, right up there with ‘tax law’ and that economics books are as enticing to most readers as a fat stack of local council permit applications.

Hell, I’m with you on this. I had to study the dismal science that is economics at school, and again in first year university. I can tell you from experience that there is no stimulant on earth short of mainlined honey badger adrenaline that can keep me awake in a lecture on supply/demand graphs.

Poor Economics however is that rare unicorn of reading- an interesting economics book. Like Loretta Napoleoni's works Terror Incorporated and Rogue Economics and Adam Tooze’s Wages of Destruction, Duflo and Banerjee’s work mixes hard economic fact with fascinating examples of real world problems.

If you’ve ever despaired at the seemingly intractable nature of poverty around the world this is a book that will give you hope.

Duflo and Banerjee (D+B) stress the importance of information gathering, of speaking to the poor, of exploring what it is that makes it hard for them to increase their incomes, and in the process they explore some fascinating case studies and trials of attempt to help the poor, and the many success and failures they have witnessed.

A number of my assumptions were overturned, for example; while I thought starvation and malnutrition were first-order issues in addressing poverty, hunger is not the problem it was. Getting enough calories is not an intractable problem for many of the world’s poor, and in some places declines in manual labor have slightly reduced the calorie needs of communities.

Microfinance is also unlikely to be the panacea it has sometimes been claimed to be. While small loans can help the poor expand their small businesses, the nature of these businesses makes expanding them beyond subsistence level difficult. D+B do stress that microfinance can help the poor, just that the stories of poor people founding business empires on a loan of a few hundred bucks are very much outliers - most businesses hit constraints on their expansion quite early on, while others with promise can rarely access loans of the size they need.

Furthermore some well-intentioned interventions- such as a programs in Kenya that promoted marriage in order to reduce teen pregnancy, keep kids in school and limit HIV transmission - can perversely end up increasing to the problems they are trying to solve. (Horrifyingly, this focus on marriage saw more young female students getting involved with older, more financially stable men who were more likely to be carriers of HIV and expected their young wives to drop out of school to care for their children).

There are however, many interventions that can help, from focusing schools on basic skills like reading and mathematics, to subsiding treatments like de-worming tablets that pay big dividends in keeping children healthy and able to attend school for longer. D+B caution the importance of avoiding what they call the three I's: Ideology, ignorance and inertia, all of which can be overcome with programs carefully designed for the reality on the ground, not the imagined reality that so often seems to underpin aid projects.

While global poverty is crushingly resistant to being eradicated D+B offer an optimistic take on improving the lives of the poor, arguing that while there may not be easy big fixes for this problem, there are nonetheless many ways to make people's lives better while slowly changing the deprived situations that so many of our fellow humans have been stuck with. Overall, Poor Economics brings a hopeful message to an area of global policy and justice that sorely needs it.

Poor Economics is a well - researched and extensive discourse that contextualizes the realities of the lives of the poor and the real causes of poverty. The book is focused both on the "poor" and the "economics", but more than that it focusses on the "psyche of the poor" - for e.g.., what do they know, what they don't (or don't want to), what do they expect, how they make their choice, etc. The authors have advocated the use of Randomized Control Trial ( which is simply put, an experiment wherein subjects are assigned random groups and monitored under the conditions of the trial to determine the efficacy of the experimental intervention) in order to draw evidence for what actually works. The arguments put forward by the authors seem to be in-line with the ground realities since they've engaged in conversations with the poor; seems like the authors have great empathy for their subject !

I'd also appreciate the fact that the authors have not propounded a one-size-fits-all approach. Instead, they've underscored on the use of broad range of solutions / conclusions depending upon the challenge. Meticulous thinking and rigorous evaluations are the simple yet ingenious tools that can help in designing a system whose outcomes may match the intentions. After all, the gap between the intentions and the outcomes is what determines the efficacy of a policy and the transformative potential that it carries.

At times, the book gets marginally technical ( okay, not for you economic "pundits" out there ) but one can always skim through! For all those with a non - economics background, I can assure you that this book will help you to develop multiple perspectives and gain a substantial understanding of the contemporary scenario (as has been the case with me).

Important Terminologies :

1. Time Inconsistency
2. Adverse Selection
3. Moral Hazard

To some extent, this book is vulnerable to both those criticisms. The authors make a big push on the importance of empirical evidence in designing interventions – using randomized controlled tests – rather than taking bigger, ideological positions like so many development authors (e.g. Sachs, Easterly). The book also seems a repeat of DEV409 from my Masters. Of course, the second of these criticisms is a bit unfair, as DEV409 is clearly not a 101 course. Also, it’s a bit snobby, as there’s nothing wrong with popularising the basics anyway.

I’m glad I read this book, for four reasons:

First, the central idea is a good one. Given the design of most development work, it’s clear that we still need reminded of the need to move away from large, abstract and unproven ‘best practice’ programmes and towards targeted, measureable and adaptable interventions. The parts of the book that touch upon political economy (which is really all of the second half, and especially chapter 10) were also fairly open-ended, which encouraged me as there’s clearly a lot that we can still do. I hope I have the time and brains to contribute.

On that note, the book is positive and encouraging. That big ideas don’t work shouldn’t discourage us from trying, just to refocus our efforts. My pessimism about development is usually the result of my own mistaken expectations that big ideas might deliver results. Banerjee and Dufflo grant us permission to move away from this by seeking out niche opportunities at the margins.

Third, many of the policy interventions and results in the book are of interest in themselves. I was especially keen on the microfinance bits, as there seems so much potential and – of interest to me – microfinance displays an especially strong link between economic development and institutions.

Finally, the book serves as a reminder that the poor have to work their way through decision processes just as complicated as the rest of us, and often more so. Working in development, it’s easy to despair at people making the ‘wrong’ decisions, without understanding why they do so.

Banerjee and Dufflo say all this more eloquently than me, so here’s a quotation from their conclusion:

"This book is, in a sense, just an invitation to look more closely. If we resist the kind of lazy, formulaic thinking that reduces every problem to the same set of general principles; if we listen to poor people themselves and force ourselves to understand the logic of their choices; if we accept the possibility of error and subject every idea, including the most apparently commonsensical ones, to rigorous empirical testing, then we will be able not only to construct a toolbox of effective policies but also to better understand why the poor live the way they do".

The trouble is it encourages a dislike for intellectualism - the ignorant start thinking their ignorance is as good as someone's life time of studies. Twitter takes it to a whole new league - because there, no one knows differenc ebetween wits and wisdom. And there is really no room for a thought that might require more than 140 characters to express itself.

No wonder, Banerjee and Duflo's winning Nobel prize was not loved by genuis people on twitter. Most of them argue all banerjee has ever said is *insert some simplistic idea about removing poverty like freebies* which is hardly new.

I have my own reasons to dislike most of intellectuals - they often seem to be waiving theories in air. But these two don't suffer that problem either.

Instead of giving sweeping theories, they are just sharing the observations on a number of ground realities - talking about things that have worked and things that have not worked, about the experiments they carried out etc.

I don't want to go into details and to try to summarise or it would seem to be a case of over-simplification, so I will leave with this quote:

"This book is, in a sense, just an invitation to look more closely. If we resist the kind of lazy, formulaic thinking that reduces every problem to the same set of general principles; if we listen to poor people themselves and force ourselves to understand the logic of their choices; if we accept the possibility of error and subject every idea, including the most apparently commonsensical ones, to rigorous empirical testing, then we will be able not only to construct a toolbox of effective policies but also to better understand why the poor live the way they do. Armed with this patient understanding, we can identify the poverty traps where they really are and know which tools we need to give the poor to help them get out of them."

I'll admit I was a little disappointed that the book wasn't as detailed as her lecture on the actual experiments the Poverty Action Lab has been involved in. There was much more on larger picture topics and brief summaries of experiments and how they contributed to the dialogue on how to address that particular topic within development circles.

That said, it was still a fascinating read and I felt like it's been the best thing I've read to help me catch a vision of what life is like for the international poor- those living on less than $.99 per day. (If you want to shed some light on what life is like for the poor in America, I'd suggest Nickle and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich or Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas.)

Here's the thing that just drives me crazy when I read about/think about the poor: the little inconveniences and set backs they face. I mean, the little things that can ruin MY day, like not being able to get in to see the doctor that day, or a fee I wasn't expecting, or a price hike on my favorite yogurt, are the kinds of things that determine whether or not the poor get to EAT that day, or whether they'll be able to keep their business open. And those inconveniences are in addition to all the work the poor have to do to make the right choices for their welfare that we take for granted. For instance, they have to chlorinate their own water- every time they want to drink it or cook with it- if you forget, you can get water-borne diseases which can give you diarrhea which kills millions of children every year. They have to make an effort to buy iodized salt. They can't eat fortified cereals every morning, so getting adequate micronutrients is a chore. There's no social welfare program (like social security) to back you up, and banks are essentially inaccessible to the poor. When they can manage to save money, they have to use their (now very limited) supply of self-discipline to not spend it. It's so unfair that it makes my insides wriggle.

However, this book was full of relatively easy, simple, and inexpensive ways to ameliorate those inconveniences. Like putting cheap chlorine dispensers next to the public water source, or subsidizing iodized and iron rich salt, or simple information campaigns with usable information ("Sex with older men is more likely to give you HIV" decreased the number of high school girls who had sex, got pregnant, dropped out of school, and contracted HIV compared with the control group.) Deworming children, at the cost of about $1.50 per child per year, increased their average yearly wage by the 10's of percents.

Banajerjee and Duflo propose focusing on these small forms of assistance and little nudges towards making the right decision rather than trying to find some large-scale magic bullet to eradicate poverty. Let's get this generation a little healthier and a little more educated, and get some simple policies in place and then we'll be a little step higher for the next generation. I found it hard to disagree. They often mention Jeffrey Sachs and his book "The End of Poverty" (which is currently on my bookshelf) as an opposing view. I'm curious to see what Sachs has to say.

Also, here's the word on microcredit, according to Banjerjee and Duflo. It's great for giving small loans to the poor to run small businesses. However, many of these businesses fail because so many of their neighbors go into the same business and there's not enough demand. Microcredit loans do not encourage risk-taking (and bigger businesses mean bigger risks) since most loans have to start to be repaid only a week after taking out the loan, and the other debtors in your lending group don't want you to do anything to jeopardize their ability to make a payment. Microcredit loans aren't usually practical for educational purposes (like a tuition payment) since you may or may not have the money to start paying it back a week later. In studies they did, they found microcredit users purchased more consumer goods, but didn't spend much more on education or health. Essentially, they say, microcredit loans are a way for the poor to ensure they have a job, which is no small thing, and is a useful service, but it's not a cure-all for poverty.

It is thoughtful and rigorous, though possibly slightly too technocratic at times. Occasionally I thought they needed a little more sociologist than economist in them (for example when considering the way people internalise and conform to social expectations) to toughen up their analysis, but over all this is a very welcome addition to development literature.

They draw 5 broad conclusions about poverty and ways to address it:

1) The poor often lack critical pieces of information and believe things that are not true.
2) The poor bear responsibility for too many aspects of their lives. “The richer you are, the more the “right” decisions are made for you.
3) Some markets are missing for the poor, or the poor face unfavourable prices for critical goods.
4) Most program failures are not inevitable, but the result of a flaw, and one or more of ignorance, ideology and inertia.
5) Expectations of what people can and cannot do often end up turning into self-fulfilling prophecies.

Building on 2) above, their take-down of the self-congratulation of the wealthy and concomitant stigmatisation of poor people is outstanding:

Our real advantage comes from many things that we take as given. We live in houses where clean water gets piped in – we do not need to remember to add Chlorin to the water supply every morning. The sewage goes away on its own – we do not actually know how. We can (mostly) trust our doctors to do the best they can and can trust the public health system to figure out what we should and should not do. We have no choice but to get our children immunized – public schools will not take them if they aren’t – and even if we somehow manage to fail to do it, our children will probably be safe because everyone else is immunized. Our health insurers reward us for joining the gym, because they are concerned that we will not do it otherwise. And perhaps most important, we do not have to worry where our next meal will come from. In other words, we rarely need to draw upon our limited endowment of self-control and decisiveness, while the poor are constantly being required to do so. (68)

They bring their analysis down to specific recommendations about concrete programs that will make a difference in the lives of poor people, such as improving the nutritional yields of foods that people like to eat, increasing access to immunisation, giving away bednets and giving cash transfers (conditional or otherwise).

It's a great read, skewering inappropriate poverty diagnoses and poorly-designed interventions, but offering powerful examples of hope and transformation.

I read it in the same fortnight as Getting Better by Charles Kenney earlier this year and it really works as a great micro-economic companion piece to his macro-economic take on global development and the fight against poverty.

The authors, Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, are a couple that won the 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (together with Michael Kremer, among other things making them possibly he youngest economists to win it. Their main research is about different aspects of poverty and possible ways to alleviate it. Their preferred method is randomized control trials (RCTs), a great tool to check whether treatments work, but with some inherent problems – usually a small sample size, difficulties with simple and well-defined alternatives.

The book is split in two parts, first discussing aspects of poverty and the second discussing institutions that can help to get people out of it. Note that most studies were performed in the 1990s or early 2000s (the book is from 2011), so often there is some fresher studies, if anyone is interested.

The first part looks at 4 aspects: hunger, diseases, education and family size. It is great as a critique of simplistic approaches to the subject from either Left (give poor more money, food or goods) or Right (poor deserve what they got; any intervention only worsens). If a majority of recent economic books aimed for a broad readership is left-leaning, this one is surprisingly unbiased.

There follows an interesting piece on each of the aspects:

Poor people may limit own diet to collect money for a TV set, or spend money on festivals – people don’t blindly follow Maslow’s pyramid. Additional money can be spend not on more food but on tasty items

Low vaccination rates maybe due to reasons other that just lack of info or stupidity; even simple tweaks like offering 2 pounds of dal (dried beans, a staple in the area, worth less than half the daily wage earned by working in a public works site) for each immunization and a set of stainless steel plates for completing the course increased the immunization rate in the village where the camps were set up sevenfold (to 38 percent).

Goals for schools often are set to get kids enrolled, not what to teach them. As a result, in Kenya, 27 percent of children in fifth grade could not read a simple paragraph in English, and 23 percent could not read in Kiswahili (the two languages of instruction in primary school), 30 percent could not do basic division. In Pakistan, 80 percent of children in third grade could not read a first-grade-level paragraph. Parents see education primarily as a way for their children to acquire (considerable) wealth. They also tend to believe that the first few years of education pay much less than the next ones, no instead of broad education, they go all-in to get one child to get higher education, while others don’t even get a few years of primary schools.

One issue that immediately arises when we think about fertility choice, however, is whose choice? Women preferences for fertility are quite different from those of men, so when a study provided 836 married women in Zambia, with a voucher guaranteeing free and immediate access to a range of modern contraceptives through a private appointment with a family-planning nurse, where part of women received the voucher in private, others in the presence of their husbands. Compared to cases where husbands were involved, women who were seen alone were 23 percent more likely to visit a family-planning nurse, 38 percent more likely to ask for a relatively concealable form of contraception (injectable contraceptives or contraceptive implants), and 57 percent less likely to report an unwanted birth nine to fourteen months later.

The second part of the book deals with institutions that are opposite to a usual government top-down approach, like micro-credits, voluntary school helpers, and the like.

I was ready for a doom and gloom survey of how the world's governments fail the poor with some talk about here's what we could do. Banerjee instead talks about the programs in place from India to Costa Rica to Nigeria, how well they are doing, what the governments are doing to help or hinder and what the data suggests they should do next. It was quite simply fascinating. They pulled no punches in discussing how some of there ideas failed and why which for me lends the ultimate credibility.

Very easy to read, the stories and topics flow nicely and I would recommend to anyone.

On the other hand, they wonder why so many programs espoused by the elites of the world aren't working (you know the kind, the let's-teach-slum-kids-Python-programming kind), and why the do-nothing William Easterly approach isn't working, and why expectations aren't being met. I just want to whisper to them... "the problem is capitalism, ya dummies."

By failing to examine how systems are rigged to distribute money upwards, by failing to recognize power dynamics, by occasionally resorting to some of the starry-eyed nonsense that they aim to critique, this comes off as weak tea at best, and a missive by the handmaidens of neoliberalism at worst.

It was a summary of "some aid is good aid" which I already believe, so I guess the persuasion wasn't attractive to me. The details, though, were mostly things I'd already heard or read. I think watching Esther Duflo's TED talk might give away most of the information and excitement of this book.

If you're wondering why not everyone agrees with "The End of Poverty" then maybe this book would impress you. Or if you're still super excited about microlending.

Maybe I'm just jaded enough such that I'd rather hear more about the cases where aid seems to be surprisingly helpful, rather than another takedown of aid fads of the past 10 years.

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo are MIT profs and economists who spent decades understanding and studying these nuances. I got to know about the book from their online lecture series on this topic. This book has helped me understand a lot more about the lives of poor people and what it’s like to live under 99 cents a day. There are myriad of reason why the poor people are stuck in a loop, more properly defined as a poverty trap. They have a very unique approach of studying most issues in the form of Randomized Control Trials RCTs. I spend my day writing software and ML models, running n-way tests, of course I think this approach makes complete sense. You can discuss meta issues all you want but things need to be implemented on the ground. This RCT approach provides good data about what works and what doesn’t work. At times, it might be opposite of what your initial assumption and gives an opportunity to learn more about the lives of poor based on the results. A lot of the these experiments were from rural India and I could connect the dots to my own observations. There are dedicated chapters about hunger, health, education, family planning, insurance, microcredit, savings and politics. They offer a lot of examples from the ground reality and experiement/studies related to these issues. Last chapter on politics is a good meta study of a lot of different economic views from different economists (e.g. authors of Why Nations Fail).

Overall, I really enjoyed reading this book. It offers a unique in-depth look into the life of the bottom billion of this planet. If nothing else, it’ll help you recognize all your privilege and have more sympathy with those stuck in a brutal poverty trap.

I really liked how the book never claims to prescribe a one-size-fits-all solution, and instead consistently highlights the intricacies involved in each situation, cautioning against generalizing from one setting to another. A great read for anyone interested in development economics or even in understanding the big and small aspects of the lives of people living in poverty.