Poor Economics: The Surprising Truth about Life on Less Than $1 a Day

What a book! It is usually fiction that is described as un-put-downable, but I have not devoured a novel as eagerly as I this enlightening, surprising, uplifting and inspiring volume for quite some time. Admittedly, it vindicated my hostility towards any kind of ideology, yet the authors do not simply dismantle fondly harboured notions, they make precise and workable suggestions how to help the poor. Moreover, we could do worse than applying their findings to the social and economic policies in developed nations. Very highly recommended.

I honestly think that everyone should read this book. Really well written and engaging. I sometimes struggle to read non-fiction but this kept me interested the whole way through. It talks about some really interesting studies and projects with a wide range of themes under the International Development umbrella. I recommend this to everyone.

Sounds good doesn’t work.Written as a weird mix of academia and leisure book. The topic is very interesting however having read 119 pages in months whereas it usually takes me 5-7 days to finish a book I can safely say don’t bother.All of this could be one longer article in business journal. Unfortunately as a “book” it simply falls short of expectations or any common sense at all...

"We also have no lever guaranteed to eradicate poverty, but once we accept that, time is on our side. Poverty has been with us for many thousands of years; if we have to wait another fifty or hundred years for the end of poverty; so be it. At least we can stop pretending that there is some solution at hand and instead join hands with millions of well-intentioned people across the world - elected officials and bureaucrats, teachers and NGO worker, academics and entrepreneurs - in the quest for the many ideas, big and small, that will eventually take us to that world where no one has to live on 99 cents per day." (p.273)After all that is said and done, THIS is the concluding remark, the very last paragraph of the book. It came as a shock, especially when the authors had added so much understanding and many insights to the debate on poverty. But it is the truth that humbles us - the social crusaders who want to change the world from the backseat by "the kind of lazy, formulaic thinking that reduces every problem to the same set of general principles", prescribing solutions that do not listen to the poor people themselves and show no understanding of their choices. Yes, I do hear that the authors speak directly to me.In a small way, I have spent most of my professional life compiling and ploughing through macroeconomic statistics. Yes, I have written many words of commentary on those statistics, but this book has made me more acutely aware how little relevance they are to people's daily life, and how little macroeconomic statistics reflect the individual people. I cannot count how many times I have written comments on the impact of the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998, with Thailand and Indonesia particularly hard hit by it. But when you ask the poor people if they felt any difference during that period, the answer was no, because poor people faced a lot of uncertainties in life already as it was, and they did not see the Asian financial crisis pose any more uncertainty outside the norm for them. This book helps me see that gulf.The issue of poverty and economic developments has always been my interest on the side, although I have never worked directly in the field. Having read this book, I now realise where macroeconomic analysis of poverty is lacking. But microeconomic analysis is tough as data are difficult to gather and requires us to get off our comfortable seat and office, get our hands dirty and go to meet with the real people in real life. This is what the authors of this book have done. I admire their patience, their sincerity in their attempt to truly understand the issues they set out to investigate, and their professional skills in designing their "experiments" and processing their findings, such that anecdotes do not remain some random anecdotes! I agree with other reviewers that they are fine economists.I like this book because it confronts many paradoxes about the poor people head on, and attempts to make sense what seems irrational! I feel so enlightened by it. The blurb even got my 9-year old son thinking, and this is the success of the book. For example, I have read about the wonders of microfinance in the Economist, as a layman. But years on, I have been puzzled why it has not made a bigger impact in the poor economies and to the poor people, if it is as wonderful as claimed. This book clears my puzzle, by their painstaking analysis of the challenges of this market, to what extent microfinance has succeeded in meeting those challenges and where the market still fails. Now I feel I have understood something.Perhaps it is rightly said that people who are interested in the issue of poverty and would like to do something about it are well-meaning people. But often good intentions not only fail but could yield perverse effects, which must be avoided. This book has urged a new approach to policymaking, which has predominantly relied on and measured by macroeconomic statistics. Perhaps it is high time we derived a policy framework to make more use of microeconomic analysis, although I acknowledge that it is not easy, not least because of the difficulties in generating consistent and comparable intertemporal and interspatial microeconomic data for policy purposes. And as taxpayer, we have the duty to learn more if our money is well-spent. Among other things, we should be interested if our aid programmes to the poor countries is indeed helping the poor people effectively; the percentage of GDP that we spend on aid sheds very little insight into that. And this book links us to the people, not the issues, whom we try to help.

Repetitive and more anecdotal than scientific. As the authors have been awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize for Economics 'for their experimental approach to alleviating poverty', it is unfathomable why they did not set out their arguments according to the protocol followed in randomized trials: Introduction, Objectives, Materials and Methods, Results, Discussion.