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

Living on 99 cents a day means you have limited access to information—newspapers, television, and books all cost money—and so you often just don’t know certain facts that the rest of the world takes as given, like, for example, that vaccines can stop your child from getting measles.

Poor countries are poor because they are hot, infertile, malaria infested, often landlocked; this makes it hard for them to be productive without an initial large investment to help them deal with these endemic problems.

The problem is that there are no straightforward ways to identify talent, unless one is willing to spend a lot of time doing what the education system should have been doing: giving people enough chances to show what they are good at.Yet

The government (or a well-meaning NGO) should make the option that it thinks is the best for most people the default choice, so that people will need to actively move away from it if they want to.

During droughts in India in the 1960s, little girls in landless households were much more likely to die than boys, but boys’ and girls’ death rates were not very different when there was normal rainfall.16 Reminiscent of the witch hunt of the little ice age, Tanzania experiences a rash of “witch” killings whenever there is a drought—a convenient wa

large-scale waste and policy failure often happen not because of any deep structural problem but because of lazy thinking at the stage of policy design.

Decent sanitation facilities are even rarer among the poor—42 percent of the world’s population lives without a toilet at home.

There is no steep jump in income once people start eating enough. This suggests that the very poor benefit more from eating extra calories than the less poor.

Dreze note that the decline in calorie consumption over the last quarter century could be entirely explained by a modest decrease in the number of people engaged in physically heavy work for a large part of the day.