Poor Economics

A fully updated edition of the seminal work in which the Nobel Prize-winning economists upend assumptions by revealing the unexpected choices that the poorest people make

Why would a man in Morocco who doesn’t have enough to eat buy a television?
Why do the poorest people in India spend 7 percent of their food budget on sugar?
Does having lots of children actually make you poorer?

This eye-opening book overturns the myths about what it is like to live on very little, revealing the unexpected decisions that millions of people make every day. Looking at some of the most paradoxical aspects of life below the poverty line – why the poor need to borrow in order to save, why incentives that seem effective to us may not be for them, and why, despite being more risk-taking than high financiers, they start businesses but rarely grow them – Banerjee and Duflo offer a new understanding of the surprising way the world really works.

This fully revised edition is updated with two new chapters that bring further insights from the last decade of research.

Author Biography

Abhijit V. Banerjee (Author) 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.

Esther Duflo (Author) 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).