Poor Economics

About “Poor Economics”

The book argues that billions of government dollars and thousands of charities and NGOs devoted to helping the world's poor often rely on untested, sometimes harmful assumptions. Banerjee and Duflo, who pioneered randomized control trials in development economics through MIT's Poverty Action Lab, challenge presumptions such as microfinance as a cure-all and schooling as equal to learning, showing that life for the poor is a more perilous adventure than for the affluent. A 2011 non-fiction book by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo.