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Poor Economics

A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty

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Poor Economics

By: Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo
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About this listen

The winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics upend the most common assumptions about how economics works in this gripping and disruptive portrait of how poor people actually live.

Why do the poor borrow to save? Why do they miss out on free life-saving immunizations, but pay for unnecessary drugs? In Poor Economics, Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, two award-winning MIT professors, answer these questions based on years of field research from around the world. Called "marvelous, rewarding" by the Wall Street Journal, the book offers a radical rethinking of the economics of poverty and an intimate view of life on 99 cents a day. Poor Economics shows that creating a world without poverty begins with understanding the daily decisions facing the poor.

©2012 Abhijit V. Banerjee (P)2025 PublicAffairs

Critic Reviews

By the winners of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics
Winner of the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Best Business Book of the Year
“Randomized trials are the hottest thing in the fight against poverty, and two excellent new books have just come out by leaders in the field. One is Poor Economics by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. These terrific books move the debate to the crucial question: What kind of aid works best?”—New York Times
“Marvelous, rewarding... the sheer detail and warm sympathy on display reflects a true appreciation of the challenges their subjects face. They have fought to establish a beachhead of honesty and rigor about evidence, evaluation and complexity in an aid world that would prefer to stick to glossy brochures and celebrity photo‑ops. For this they deserve to be congratulated‑‑and to be read.”—Wall Street Journal
“The ingenuity of these experiments aside, it is the rich and humane portrayal of the lives of the very poor that most impresses. [The authors] show how those in poverty make sophisticated calculations in the grimmest of circumstances. . . . Books such as these offer a better path forward. They are surely an experiment worth pursuing.”—Financial Times

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