Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty

“For more than fifteen years Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo have worked with the poor in dozens of countries spanning five continents, trying to understand the specific problems that come with poverty and to find proven solutions. Their book is radical in its rethinking of the economics of poverty, but also entirely practical in the suggestions it offers. Through a careful analysis of a very rich body of evidence, including the hundreds of randomized control trials that Banerjee and Duflo’s lab has pioneered, they show why the poor, despite having the same desires and abilities as anyone else, end up with entirely different lives.

Through their work, Banerjee and Duflo look at some of the most surprising facets of poverty: why the poor need to borrow in order to save, why they miss out on free life-saving immunizations but pay for drugs that they do not need, why they start many businesses but do not grow any of them, and many other puzzling facts about living with less than 99 cents per day.

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 from evidence. Banerjee and Duflo are practical visionaries whose meticulous workoffers transformative potential for poor people anywhere, and is a vital guide to policy makers, philanthropists, activists and anyone else who cares about building a world without poverty.”

I bought this book on a whim on one of my recent book binges. I hadn’t heard anything about this book prior to buying it, but was pleasantly surprised (and excited) when I found the book’s excellent website, among some great economics and development bloggers I follow who recommend the book. It is even used as required reading in many university-level development courses.

The book was also recently awarded the Best Business Book of the Year prize by the Financial Times (FT) and Goldman Sachs.

I have high expectations for the book after reading about it and I highly recommend you pick up a copy for your own economics/development collection. Those who recommend it say it is not heavy reading, so go buy it and dive in!

Disclaimer: I linked to Amazon.com for those money-conscious readers buying the book online, but I highly recommend supporting your local brick-and-mortar bookseller by buying it there instead.

Starting Dec. 30, the Satellite Sentinel Project — a joint experiment by the U.N.’s Operational Satellite Applications Programme, Harvard University, the Enough Project and Clooney’s posse of Hollywood funders — will hire private satellites to monitor troop movements starting with the oil-rich region of Abyei. The images will be analyzed and made public at www.satsentinel.org (which goes live on Dec. 29) within 24 hours of an event to remind the leaders of northern and southern Sudan that they are being watched. “We are the antigenocide paparazzi,” Clooney tells TIME. “We want them to enjoy the level of celebrity attention that I usually get. If you know your actions are going to be covered, you tend to behave much differently than when you operate in a vacuum.”

That’s Mark Benjamin, writing for TIME.com about a joint experiment by the U.N.’s Operational Satellite Applications Programme, Harvard University, the Enough Project, Google, and a host of other heavy-hitting supporters.

Visit the Satellite Sentinel website here.

“Many of the people I’ve studied are not humble, but they are deeply generous people. Fundamentally they know how to share credit. They want to get it done, regardless of who gets the credit. That’s what leadership is all about.“–Harvard professor Linda A. Hill

• Getting Africa’s big ideas out of the lab via @SciDevNet
• What is an “entrepreneur”? Probably not what you think. h/t to @DaveAlgoso
• Is There a Failure of Imagination in International Development? via Hauser Center
• Why Charities Should Have an Expiration Date via @nancylublin at @FastCompany
• Can ICTs support accountability and transparency in education? via @meowtree

“The most valuable part of comparative work in another culture is the chance to be shaken by it, and the experience of struggling to understand it.”-Susan Goldberg, Infant Care and Growth in Urban Zambia, 1977

“Your brain is continually looking for bad news. As soon as it finds some, it fixates on it with tunnel vision, fast-tracks it into memory storage, and then reactivates it at the least hint of anything even vaguely similar.”-Rick Hanson On “Keeping Fear Alive”

• World’s Biggest Tree Planting Project: 60 Million Mangroves (in Senegal)
• Lehigh Valley businessman Abraham Zegeye to build school in father’s native village in Ethiopia
• Did you know there are over 9,000 Kenyans on Twitter? Check out some of the best. h/t to @mkaigwa
• Seven African tech start-ups receive seed funding via @ghtech
• Mobile Phones Connect Ugandan Farmers to Agricultural Information

“the most important thing about traveling is to leave one’s assumptions at home, and to empty oneself out as much as possible…to try to see the world through the eyes of people very different from oneself.”-Pico Iyer

“For a long time, even when I was going to school, we were taught that the structure of the human brain was basically fixed by the time we got to our early 20s. But it’s become clear in the last few decades that in fact, even the adult human brain is quite malleable. And our neural circuitry is kind of always in the process of adapting to circumstances and to environment and to the tools we use, particularly those for finding information and making sense of information.”–Nicholas Carr