Poor Economics

Product Description

This title comes from the award-winning founders of the unique & remarkable Abdul Latfi Jameel Poverty Action Laboratory at MIT a transformative reappraisal of the world of the extreme poor their lives desires & frustrations. Billions of government dollars & thousands of charitable organizations & NGOs are dedicated to helping the worlds poor. But much of the work they do is based on assumptions that are untested generalizations at best flat out harmful misperceptions at worst. Banerjee & Duflo have pioneered the use of randomized control trials in development economics. Work based on these principles supervised by the Poverty Action Lab at MIT is being carried out in dozens of countries. Drawing on this & their 15 years of research from Chile to India Kenya to Indonesia they have identified wholly new aspects of the behavior of poor people their needs & the way that aid or financial investment can affect their lives. Their work transforms certain presumptions: that microfinance is a cure-all that schooling equals learning that poverty at the level of 99 cents a day is just a more extreme version of the experience any of us have when our income falls uncomfortably low. Throughout the authors emphasize that life for the poor is simply not like life for everyone else: it is a much more perilous adventure denied many of the cushions & advantages that are routinely provided to the more affluent: if they do not have a piped water supply the poor cannot benefit from chlorination; if they cannot afford ready-made breakfast cereals they cannot gain the enriched vitamins & other nutrients; they are routinely denied access to markets; & they get negative interest rates on their savings while exorbitant rates are charged on their loans. The daily stress of poverty discourages long-term thinking & often leads to bad decision-making. Add to that the fact the poor are routinely denied the information that might help them manage the nightmarish predicament that in most cases they are born into through no fault of their own. Bannerjee & Duflo are practical visionaries whose meticulous work offers all of us an opportunity to think of a world beyond poverty.