Poor Economics

I have been reading Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty by Abhijit V. Benerjee and Esther Duflo. I haven't finished it yet but already it ranks as one of the best books I have ever read about development.

While fully aware of the theoretical debates about development, Banerjee and Duflo encourage developmental practitioners to focus on the facts on the ground and promote an experimental approach to analysing why the poor make the decisions they do. They argue that only once we understand how the poor make decisions can we design appropriate policy.

And what they uncover is that the poor are just like the risk - for instance, the same "time inconsistency" that sees the rich resolving year after year to go to gym and never getting there also sees the poor failing to vaccinate their children. And they point out that the rich may sneer at the poor for turning to traditional medicine but the rich turn to all sorts of alternative medicines when struggling to understand illness.

For me, the most revealing insight was that one of the problems in education is the focus on getting through a set curriculum. They point out how this often results in both teachers and parents focusing all their efforts on the most talented children, rather than encouraging basic literacy and numeracy for all children as a first priority. Their argument makes so much sense, yet I've never seen anyone else point this out. They show how the same teachers who get nothing out of the weak children during school term are able to teach them to read in holidays - why? Because in the holidays, they don't focus on getting the strongest students through the syllabus.