Center for Social Innovation

The core of Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo’s new book, Poor Economics, can be summed up by a single sentence in the foreword: “[W]e have to abandon the habit of reducing the poor to cartoon characters and take the time to really understand their lives, in all their complexity and richness.”

The next 250-plus pages do exactly that, describing and analyzing the choices that people living on less than $2 a day make. Those choices tend to make a great deal of sense after some illumination and contemplation. For instance, it’s common for poor families to invest their entire education budget in just one child, usually a son, hoping that this child will make it through secondary school, while shortchanging the other children. Why? Many families think the value of schooling comes from getting the local equivalent of a high school diploma, not from attending another semester of school. It would be a ... Read more