Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
4 ☆Scott Fitzgerald may have observed "that [the very rich] are different from you and me," but many believe the same about the very poor. Billions of dollars have been committed to eradicating global poverty, defined here as living on the purchasing power parity equivalent of $1 a day. Two public policy economists have articulated strenuously about the big picture questions - such as "what ultimately caused poverty?" (A grossly simplified explanation follows.) The End of Poverty by Jeffrey D. S...
So. This is an economics book.(A rumbling sound is heard as ninety percent of the people reading this review frantically jiggle their mice in an effort to click another link on this page. Any link. Even an ad for laundry detergent.)Ok, hello to the two remaining readers out there. Thank you for sticking around. I know ‘economics’ is one of the least sexy words in reading, right up there with ‘tax law’ and that economics books are as enticing to most readers as a fat stack of local council permit...
This is one of the best "pop-economics" books I have read in a very long time. Such books typically follow the same recipe: top academic seeks recognition outside the profession and writes the book propounding the theory, enlisting in support loads of evidence consistent with the theory, and curiously brushing off/forgetting to mention most of any evidence even vaguely incompatible with the main argument of the book. The book tends to go on forever repeating the same score in all possible tonali...
Amartya Sen, the patron saint of Politics, Philosophy and Economics studies approves of this book so that's really all you need to know. Review to come!
Full of individual stories about the way the poor cope with their life. I normally classify such books as "sad". Not this one. The book is offering something that I haven't seen in many other books that are dealing with poverty. It is exploring first the left extreme of the spectrum that focuses on collectivism, then the right that is focused on the individualism, and finally tries to put itself somewhere in between. Each side is backed by examples of its supporters. The main heroes of the book
"Poor Economics" was one of the most enlightening books I had the pleasure of devouring this year. I'm neither an economics student nor do I profess to have any knowledge regarding the subject. What I have is a keen interest in everything unknown to me. And, this was book sure opened me up to a new cognizance.On average, the poor people live on 99 cents per day. The fact which is shocking by itself also puts them at a great disadvantage because of a lack of resources and knowledge. To alleviate
(Note to Self to include this when writing a full blown review for this book).I recently read an article* published in NY Times on how women economists are NOT recognized for their work when they co-author it with another a male economist. The article goes on to explain how the bias is deep entrenched in the field of economics. Recently, I was having a conversation with a friend, working in the field of finance, on the Indian economy and more particularly about the drought which has hit most sta...
Poor Economics doesn't simply offer a unilateral view of how to fight global poverty; rather, this book offers views from both sides of the foreign aid debate (i.e. Sachs v. Easterly) and provides examples of different organizations that have dealt with attacking poverty on both small and large scales. There are five key takeaways from Poor Economics, with regard to any localized campaigns attempting to improve the lives of the poor:1) Individuals/communities inherently believe that outside orga...
Disappointing. I was very eager to read about rigorous studies that determine what works for fighting poverty. But the authors somehow kept getting off track from this desperately important concept. I still think the work of the Poverty Action Lab is very interesting, but this is just not an exciting book about a "radical rethinking of the way to fight global poverty."The big five lessons from the authors are:1. The poor lack information (so tell them the truth artfully)2. The poor lack control
3.5 stars. The downside first: Living in a developing country and far away from policymaking processes, I might not be the main target audience. Some parts are familiar. The authors used a lot of examples from my country so I got annoyed sometimes with the typos on names, places, and religious holidays. The mid parts of the book was a bit hard to digest, not sure why but I felt it took way too long to get into the point/gist of the argument. Or maybe since I suck at economics so my brain could n...
No this is not about how useless economics had become under the hegemony of the Chicago School of Free Market Fundamentalism. This is about the economics of being poor. And refreshingly instead of focusing on the theories of poverty and the decision making of the poor, it is based on large scale, many country research asking those on less than a $1 a day how they make decisions on how they spend their money, what food to eat, what health care to seek, what education to try to get their children....
Radical? [Through my ratings, reviews and edits I'm providing intellectual property and labor to Amazon.com Inc., listed on Nasdaq, which fully owns Goodreads.com and in 2013 posted revenues for $74 billion and $274 million profits. Intellectual property and labor require compensation. Amazon.com Inc. is also requested to provide assurance that its employees and contractors' work conditions meet the highest health and safety standards at all the company's sites.] In the paperback edition the t
Although I ain't an economics student, I picked this book to expand my world view. And I'd say that it has been quite helpful in doing so, given the fundamental insights that it offers. Poor Economics is a well - researched and extensive discourse that contextualizes the realities of the lives of the poor and the real causes of poverty. The book is focused both on the "poor" and the "economics", but more than that it focusses on the "psyche of the poor" - for e.g.., what do they know, what they
This kind of book can be annoying, as popular social science tends to fall into one of two camps. The first are those that just repeat a single idea over an over again (e.g. The Tipping Point). The second are those that simply rehash 101 textbooks, adding a few kooky examples or anecdotes (e.g. The Undercover Economist).To some extent, this book is vulnerable to both those criticisms. The authors make a big push on the importance of empirical evidence in designing interventions – using randomize...
This book is not what I thought it was or what it promised it would be in the intro. It is not an economic analysis of poverty. I was thinking it would be more in line with books like scarcity that explain the decisionmaking of poor people as a rational response to circumstances. It had elements of that certainly, but it was a book about development. I didn't love the first half of the book, but I thought the second half or third was very useful. Especially their analysis of micro-credit and oth...
Probably one of the biggest nemises of all intelligent thought is over-simplification. An easy example is one guy giving a detailed long explanation of something, and another underpnning it by saying "so you are saying ... *Insert a small sentence*". This is most visible in interviews where interviewer seems to sometimes doing it intentionally to save his ignorant, lazy audience the effort of understanding a complex thought.The trouble is it encourages a dislike for intellectualism - the ignoran...
I mentioned this book on my blog here, http://livingeden.blogspot.com/2011/1..., and now I finally read it! I'll admit I was a little disappointed that the book wasn't as detailed as her lecture on the actual experiments the Poverty Action Lab has been involved in. There was much more on larger picture topics and brief summaries of experiments and how they contributed to the dialogue on how to address that particular topic within development circles.That said, it was still a fascinating read and...
Banerjee and Duflo have written a great book that aims to see poverty as a “set of concrete problems that, once properly identifed and understood, can be solved one at a time.” Using the best economic and observational evidence (often taken from randomised trials) they build a case for what actually works in helping overcome poverty, taking up the fight against what they argue are the biggest barriers – ignorance, ideology and inertia.It is thoughtful and rigorous, though possibly slightly too t...
Poor Economics is revolutionary. That is a fact, and we should all agree. I want to get into the nuance of RCTs in development a little bit here, and mostly, that's why it's not a five star book. Also, this isn't a fun review. I may not have used diagrams here, but let's face it, we are talking economics here, and some would call it dry. This is going to be a long, rambly, clunky review of a rather elegant book. Also, I have so much more to say about this, I'm going to be editing and re-writing
This is a non-fic about poverty and ways to eradicate it, ones that worked and others that failed. I read is as a part of monthly reading for July 2021 at Non Fiction Book Club group.The authors, Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, are a couple that won the 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (together with Michael Kremer, among other things making them possibly he youngest economists to win it. Their main research is about different aspects of poverty and possible ways to alleviate...