Poor Economics A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty

by Banerjee, Abhijit V.; Duflo, Esther

• ISBN13: 9781541706187
• ISBN10: 1541706188
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781541706194
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2025-09-16
• Publisher: PublicAffairs
• More Book Details

Summary

In this new edition of their classic work, the winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics upend the most common assumptions about how economics works, providing a “rich and humane” (Financial Times) examination of how poor people actually live

Why do the poor borrow to save? Why do they miss out on free lifesaving immunizations but pay for unnecessary drugs? Why do children from poor families attend school but fail to learn anything? 
 
In Poor Economics, Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, two Nobel Prize–winning MIT professors, answer these questions based on years of field research from around the world. Together, they investigate what the lives and choices of the poor tell us about how to fight global poverty, from why microfinance is useful without being the miracle some hoped it would be to why the poor don’t want health insurance. Throughout, they reveal that even as many magic bullets of yesterday have ended up as today’s failed ideas, there is a path forward through this challenge.  
 
Updated with significant new material based on insights from the last decade of research, Poor Economics is a radical and hopeful rethinking of the economics of poverty and an intimate view of the life of the poor around the world.  

Author Biography

Abhijit Banerjee, winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics, is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). In 2011, he was named one of Foreign Policy magazine's top 100 global thinkers. Banerjee served on the U.N. Secretary-General's High-level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Esther Duflo, winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics, is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). Duflo is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science, and has received numerous academic honors and prizes including the Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences (2015), the Infosys Prize (2014), the Dan David Prize (2013), a John Bates Clark Medal (2010), and a MacArthur "Genius Grant" Fellowship (2009). Duflo is a member of the President's Global Development Council and a Founding Editor of the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, and is currently the editor of the American Economic Review. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.