Comments on: Poor Economics – a rich new book from Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo

By: Rasna Warah

Rasna Warah — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 08:09:44 +0000

Fascinating talk by Duflo. I live in Kenya’s coastline, where malaria is endemic and where treated bed nets are distributed for free at government clinics. However, many people I have spoken to say that while they use them for their children, they do not use them as adults as the nets are “suffocating”. (I too didn’t use them till I got a four-poster bed) The very simple solution would be to design nets that could fit around a frame around the bed. (I wouldn’t have known this if I hadn’t asked the question.)

Regarding aid, I recently edited and published a book called Missionaries, Mercenaries and Misfits (available on Amazon) that shows that it is not the amount of aid that matters, nor the quality. The problem is that most aid ends up paying for administrative costs of donors or gets siphoned off by corrupt officials in government, in the UN or even in NGOs. In fact, aid is an industry that serves donors more than beneficiaries. And it can also be a form of neo-colonialism that perpetuates poverty. Aid also de-industrialises nations as pointed out by Erik Reinhert in his brilliant book How Rich Countries Got Rich and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor.

By: Stephen Jones

Stephen Jones — Tue, 17 May 2011 12:04:19 +0000

@Michael – Because Banerjee and Duflo want to understand why poor people hold particular opinions or beliefs, and qualitative research (including talking to the poor) is an important tool in helping answer this question of ‘why’.

By: Michael

Michael — Sun, 15 May 2011 14:48:03 +0000

If Duflo and Bannerjee’s opinion is that ignorance prevents poor people from improving their lives, then why would they seek to destroy the value of their data by confounding it with the opinions of the ignorant?

By: Stephen Jones

Stephen Jones — Thu, 12 May 2011 08:53:05 +0000

Nice summary Duncan. On the issue of Poor Economics missing out rigorous qualitative research with the poor to understand ‘why’ their quantitative findings occur, Open the Echo Chamber (http://www.edwardrcarr.com/opentheechochamber/?p=327) goes further, arguing that there is a lack of engagement (or apparent lack of engagement from what they write) of previous qualitative research in these fields that would have been illuminating even before they started their own surveys or RCTs. Pas a Pas blog (http://pasapasblog.wordpress.com)
suggests that we need an Innovations for Poverty Action that really includes the rigorous qualitative aspect of research too. I’d love to hear more from people involved about how much this is done in practice – perhaps donor constraints etc are an issue, or the perceived need to place more faith in just the quantitative data?

I haven’t quite finished Poor Economics myself yet, but the aspect I liked was the detailed interrogation of the poverty traps idea for different themes, rather than just one overall trap. For example, the idea Banerjee and Duflo propose that the poor create in their heads a poverty trap for education by only thinking that the later years of education have a pay-off (this leads to their first conclusion that you mention).