book

Poor Economics

by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo

Banerjee and Duflo — who later shared the 2019 economics Nobel for this approach — skip the aid-versus-markets shouting match and ask small, testable questions: why families under-invest in cheap bed nets, why a man short of food buys a television, why microcredit delivers less than promised. Built on randomised trials and field interviews, it swaps grand theories of poverty for a picture of how poor people actually decide.