Poor Economics
This book was initially not on my bucket list. After reading it, I was genuinely amused by how different my world was from the world of 692 million other people. The writers of this book, Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, are professors of economics and poverty alleviation and development economics, respectively, at MIT and the winners of the 2019 Nobel Prize in economics.
One of the most fascinating things I learnt was how the concept of the poverty trap, that we’ve all heard of, is actually debated as not being real. Economists have argued that poor people do not need to escape from the trap of poverty, because there was never one in the first place. A classic example of a poverty trap would be a farmer who needs to scale his production of crops to meet these basic requirements, but cannot do so because he does not have fertilisers. He could simply buy some. However, he does not even have money for fertilisers.
So if there is no poverty trap in this world in the first place, the farmer should theoretically not be stuck in a loop. He should be able to scale his production simply by investing a little initially, then catching momentum.
Get Prakriti Pandey’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
The other idea from this book that I know will stick with me forever is how poverty is actually linked with the death of most female children under the age of 5 throughout the world. In most cultures, a male child’s birth is more favoured, most likely due to deeply rooted patriarchy. So when a girl is born, the couple would try to conceive and hope for a male child after her. Since breastfeeding reduces the chances of impregnation, it is cut off early on for a female child. This leaves her dependent on water for hydration, which is the source of waterborne diseases. In communities experiencing financial hardship, even the cure for these waterborne diseases is inaccessible, leading to the death of female children.
Foreign aid, which is given to the poorest nations of the world, is also debated to do more harm than good. This is because the dependence of these developing nations on aid apparently slows down their own progress. However, countries like Rwanda are found to be one of the strongest examples of the counterargument.
All in all, I would say it is a good read. It really helped me understand diverse ideas of poverty, which I was very unaware of.
