Amartya Sen has rightly said in his forward to the book Poor Economics, “A marvellously insightful book by two outstanding researchers on the real nature of poverty.”

MIT economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo started their research from scratch, spending their valuable time visiting the villages of Kenya, Morocco, Indonesia, India and other developing nations speaking with the poor people of the places and studying, conducting surveys before they started writing the book, Poor Economics. The main aim of this book is to bring up the ultimate question why do the poor make such choices that leaves them rolling on the viscous cycle of poverty. The book is an extraordinary exploration on this much debated topic of Economics - Poverty. Many have come and gone speaking about it yet few took the pain of discovering the actual nature and cause of this problem that has been ailing the developing nations for long now. Poor Economics is not just a well researched book full of informative jargon but a book that for the very first time speaks out to reveal myths about the poverty trap. Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo largely disagrees with popular theories on the subject of poverty. Most prominently the authors are quite in disagreement with the popular theories of William Easterly, an economist at NYU and Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia University economist. Some economists of fairly high profile believe that grave problems as that of Poverty need big ideas to get them solved. One of such is William Easterly who believes that a Big Idea as that of community level market-based development initiative can help purge the poverty stricken nations for real.  Jeffrey Sachs believes strongly in the concept of poverty trap. He believes that once one is trapped in the poverty cycle, it will eventually lead him to one and more traps of poverty.

The poor had been stuck in the muck of poverty for generations gone and generations to come. Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo do not deny the existence of the poverty trap but to point out those Sachs-ian theories of subsidies to help cure this ague called poverty is not the ultimate solution. Subsidies can help bring temporary relief yet not the vital aid to end it. Banerjee and Duflo come to explore the fact that such theories are merely ideas and hence serve only to remain an ideal. Even in the theories of economists like William Easterly that speak for community level market-based development initiatives largely depend on donor funds for help.

Banerjee and Duflo do rediscover the fact that the poor are truly trapped yet they find the popular theories of economics quite ideal than practical. They come to attain the understanding that problems that lead to the ultimatum of the condition called poverty is quite complicated in reality. Small traps that lead to poverty are not easy to define or eradicate. These hopelessly unavoidable problems of family size, ill health, lack of education, bare financial needs and many other problems explain the cause of the persistence of poverty.

One such demon to strike the note of poverty is the lack of health care facility for all. Here is a poignant and very factual extract from the book that so helps to put for the idea into clearer light:

“Some [health] technologies are so cheap that everyone, even the very poor, should be able to afford them. Breast-feeding, for example, costs nothing at all. And yet fewer than 40 percent of the world’s infants are breast-fed exclusively for six months, the WHO recommendation…Chlorin (a brand of chlorine distributed by the social marketing organization Population Services International [PSI]) costs 800 kwachas ($0.18 US PPP) and lasts a month. This can reduce diarrhea in children by up to 48 percent…Yet only 10 percent of the population actually uses bleach to treat their water…Demand is similarly low for bed nets.”