www.pooreconomics.com (on Amazon)
Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty
Poor Economics argues that so much of anti-poverty policy has failed over the years because of an inadequate understanding of poverty. The battle against poverty can be won, but it will take patience, careful thinking and a willingness to learn using an evidence-based approach based on randomized control trials.
...Through a careful analysis of a body of evidence, including hundreds of randomized control trials Banerjee and Duflo’s lab pioneered, they show why the poor, despite having the same desires and abilities as anyone else, end up with entirely different lives. Banerjee and Duflo used randomized control trials across five continents to test the impact of policies aimed at beating poverty...
...The book Poor Economics is very helpful, because it is both empirically rigorous and insightful about the realities that the data doesn’t always capture.
Poor Economics is by two MIT economists, Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee and Esther Duflo. Their life’s work is traveling to poor countries, looking closely at what works and what doesn’t work in efforts to fight hunger and disease, improve education, and broaden access to basic financial services. The authors are directors of J-PAL, an MIT poverty action lab that’s a network of 59 professors around the world who use scientific methods to answer critical questions about alleviating poverty...
One of Bill Gates's G20 bookshelf, recommends five books.
Financial Times: Business Book of the Year 2011
Poor Economics, which champions radical new ways of tackling global poverty, is the 2011 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year. Abhijit Banerjee received the £30,000 award on behalf of his co-author Esther Duflo at a dinner in London on Thursday.
Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times and chair of the panel of judges, said he had been “blown away by the thoroughness of [Banerjee and Duflo’s] empirical research. This is going to be a real basis for innovation in policy, innovation in government, and a guide to intellectual debate. This is a business book in the broadest sense”. Read more about the winning book...
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