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

We found 22 Reddit comments about Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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22 Reddit comments about Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty:

u/2358452 · 21 pointsr/brasil

Sim, até têm sido feitos estudos recentemente com populações de extrema pobreza na África e uma das formas mais eficazes de retirar a família da extrema pobreza duradoramente (em termos de redução de pobreza por custo) é simplesmente dar uma certa quantia de dinheiro. Claro que outras formas de assistência são úteis às vezes necessárias para complementar (especialmente onde há poblemas graves e.g. sanitários, doenças, subnutrição), mas o povo em pobreza extrema geralmente não tem dinheiro nem pra respirar -- a maior parte do tempo deles é gasto em cmo economizar quantidades triviais, sem tempo ou perspectiva de procurar melhores condições. É o que chamam de "poverty trap" -- se você está em certa faixa há uma forte tendência estatística a ficar preso lá; A idéia é dar dinheiro suficiente para sair dessa faixa por uns tempos, a partir de então o indivíduo consegue subir por conta própria.

Para os interessados: (recomendo muito!)

https://www.amazon.com.br/Poor-Economics-Radical-Rethinking-Poverty/dp/1610390938

u/dmxgrrbark · 14 pointsr/Denver

I studied poverty in grad school and have worked a lot with the homeless. May I suggest you read this book - Poor Economics

u/jakewins · 14 pointsr/TrueReddit

The authors of this, Abhijit and Esther, are also the authors of the best summary-for-the-layman book I've read on international aid, Poor Economics.

If you care about data-driven conclusions and pragmatism, and if you want to get a birds-eye view of global poverty, why international aid fails, and why it succeeds, I cannot recommend this book enough.

u/josiahstevenson · 12 pointsr/badeconomics

You thinking more Poor Economics or Why Nations Fail? There's also some good stuff on urbanization's role in development in Triumph of the City which has a lot of implications for developed-world city policy too.

u/[deleted] · 8 pointsr/worldnews

Everyone interested should read Poor Economics

There's meta-analysis done to tell which is more effective: giving people nets, making them buy nets, loaning them nets, etc.

Whole book's great. Google it

u/DownAndOutInMidgar · 6 pointsr/medicine

I'm not in the deep south and I assure you it's not a deep south phenomenon.

Like I said, I don't know what the solution is. I've read some books about behavior and economics (Poor Economics in particular) which has some empirical data suggesting people value things they pay for more, even if it's a small amount. I wonder if some kind of buy-in would be valuable in this setting. Singapore does not provide any service free of charge to prevent over-utilization. Maybe something like that would be beneficial.

u/flyingdragon8 · 5 pointsr/TrueReddit

Great article. The article mentioned Poor Economics which is an entire book on developmental economics with the same overall thesis: that big ideas are counterproductive to developmental aid and that only well thought out, small scale projects fine tuned to local conditions through rigorous experimentation can significantly improve outcomes. Highly recommended reading.

u/Hynjia · 4 pointsr/sociology

General sociology? Or...something specific...

Because I've read several sociology books that were rather interesting about specific issues (usually feminism)

Let's see here:

Hobos, Hustlers,and Backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco

Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street

Real Knockouts: The Physical Feminism of Women's Self-Defense

Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty: not technically sociology, but explains how proposed economic solutions to problems are tripped up and prevented in some way by sociological issues.

Personally, all of these books were hella interesting. I think Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders was the most sociological book I read. I had no idea wtf symbolic interactionism was when I read it...but I got the gist of it because the author writes lucidly.

One I haven't read is Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. It's received nominations for awards and was very popular at one point.

u/two_beats_off · 4 pointsr/neoliberal

Has anyone read [Poor Economics] (https://www.amazon.com/Poor-Economics-Radical-Rethinking-Poverty/dp/1610390938/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1518638120&sr=8-1&keywords=Poor+Economics) before? We are currently reading it in my global public policy class and its really interesting how quickly they move past low hanging fruit (mosquito nets, food distribution) and talk about effective solutions to alleviating poverty.

u/danleene · 3 pointsr/Philippines

>sometimes people will buy stuff they have no need for even if they barely have anything left "ubos biyaya" kumbaga

I'm not rationalising but for the sake of trying to understand why it is so, here are some reasons why people spend more money than they should.

Ito pa:

The answer, according to economists who have studied this question (Banerjee & Dufflo, Poor Economics, 2011),  is that things that taste good, or things that make life less boring are a priority for the poor.

u/nongermanejackson · 2 pointsr/bestof

Banerjee and Duflo's book "Poor Economics" is a great read and it expands the type of example that Wigan Pier used to good effect.

It does so in a way that makes understanding the daily choices of poor people appreciable by those who cannot otherwise learn from lived experience.

u/maxthegeek1 · 2 pointsr/neoliberal

This podcast episode is centered on an interview of a J-Pal representative. J-pal is MIT's poverty research department. I'm reading one of its products right now, a book called Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty and it's great so far.

u/Panserborne · 2 pointsr/AskSocialScience

Poor Economics for a great discussion on the many small, incremental steps that add up and could help alleviate poverty.

The Bottom Billion for a nice discussion on the various poverty traps a country can get stuck in. This book focuses more on the bigger macro picture, and less on the incentives and lives of individuals.

Why Nations Fail - I'll admit I haven't read this yet, but a lot of people seem to rate it highly. It looks at the broad picture of what determines the wealth of nations, and especially the nature of extractive vs. inclusive institutions.

I haven't heard of anyone advocating that a central bank play a key role in ending poverty. Central banks are there to help smooth output fluctuations, by keeping unemployment near its "natural" level and inflation low and stable. There's nothing in their tool-set that could bring a country out of poverty. Though they're certainly very important as bad monetary policy can destroy a country.

To describe it another way: poverty alleviation is about creating a long-term upward trend in output per person. But there are unpredictable variations the economy experiences around this long-term trend (recessions). The central bank's job is to prevent or minimize these deviations from trend, by preventing recessions. But it does not determine the long-term trend itself.

u/systematik- · 2 pointsr/futuristparty

I don't think simply having open source info out there would be enough, I agree with you there.

I'm thinking more along the lines of utilizing a new tool or method of organizing ourselves to be able to meet the challenges that our species faces.

Imagine that you created a tool, something which maps out the Earth and within it you can toggle different overlays, such as all of our infrastructure, the sources of carbon emission, ecology data, etc. With this you can contextualize what you are doing as a great game, and the game is to, for example, transition all of our energy infrastructure to cleaner sources within the next few decades all over the planet.

You can use the tool to model infrastructure changes, etc. And then put these new models up to different sources of funding, (crowd funding, government assistance, philanthropic contribution, etc. could all contribute).

Here you'd have a system to help coordinate action, and get people thinking more about the complexities and challenges of transitioning our infrastructure.

A B. Fuller quote again:

>If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don't bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.

The game would help bring about a global bottom-up effort to transition human societies infrastructure in the next decades.

This is one application of this thinking. Let's look more at what you mentioned though, poverty.

There's different levels of poverty, of course, and everywhere is different. In the 3rd world it can be access to basic resources which is the problem. Maybe here some assistance with things like water collection, etc. could help the situation there. There are also books, f.e., about combating dire poverty in the world, it's a complex situation and you need the best approaches. But imagine a world game for attempting to meet that issue. There are different types of poverty in the first world, and there are different approaches to meeting it, and that can be worked at too.

It's not just making info available on some corner of the internet, to me it's about creating a context for action outside of the existing structures of our society, and unlocking what the best solutions are, and attempting to work on them and share what the best solutions are within a larger shared context.

I'm also a fan of the list Steele shares about the top 10 threats to humanity 1, and especially the order that they are in (first is poverty, then infectious disease, then environmental degradation, etc.) To me this is a good list with a good order of priorities. I really think he's got an excellent point about meeting "national security" threats in a preventative way by attempting to help empower the world's poor, while also working to curtail environmental destruction as an aspect of the same priorities.

Ultimately, when it comes down to it, you find the US government spends some $ 598 billion per year on the military. And look what kind of outcomes that gets towards our top 10 greatest threats. It would take massive political will, but the ideal in my mind is that eventually a huge end goal to work towards would be to divert a significant chunk of that away from the military and into something that attempts to meet these challenges in a preventative way that makes people around the world more secure/resilient/well off.

We have a 20th century Cold War operating system for our national defense, when we need an update to a 21st century operating system that is geared towards the main challenges that we are facing, and geared towards them effectively. A part of that may include military defense, but more of it includes trying to prop people around the world up and make them resilient in their own way. And that is a lot of what Steele is talking towards with his work.

Ultimately, my own opinion is that humanity legitimately does need a new form of intelligence if we are to survive and persist on this planet into the future. How can we do this? It would have to be something which could bring together data from environmental systems, as well as human systems, and something through which we could meaningfully organize ourselves to make key changes.

u/wwdqd · 2 pointsr/PoliticalScience

Took a Development Econ course a few years back. After trudging through the more standard William Easterly v. Jeffery Sachs (both of whom you should also check out) debate about the efficacy of development aid, we read Poor Economics. Refreshingly frank and empirical treatment of the subject of development, especially the ways in which best policy practice can oftentimes run against the grain of traditional economic intuition.

u/hesperidia · 2 pointsr/lostgeneration

On the emotional components of the poverty trap:

>Loss of hope and the sense that there is no easy way out can make it that much harder to have the self-control needed to try to climb back up the hill. [...] In Udaipur we met a man who said in response to a standard survey question that he had been so 'worried, tense, or anxious' that it interfered with normal activities like sleeping, working, and eating for more than a month. We asked him why. He said that his camel had died, and he had been crying and tense ever since. Somewhat naively perhaps, we then went on to ask whether he had done something about his depression (like talk to a friend, a health-care practitioner, or a traditional healer). He seemed irked: 'I have lost the camel. Of course I should be sad. There is nothing to be done.'
>
>...Symptoms of depression are much more prevalent among the poor. Being stressed makes it harder to focus, which in turn may make us less productive. In particular, there is a strong association between poverty and the level of cortisol produced by the body, an indicator of stress. And conversely, the cortisol levels go down when households receive some help.

-- Poor Economics by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo

u/emi_online · 1 pointr/LateStageCapitalism

educate yourself, this take is terrible!

u/johnmannn · 1 pointr/todayilearned

This is discussed in Poor Economics. When the poor are asked why they don't invest in things like bed nets, more nutritious food, and fertilizer, they say it's because they have no money. But when they do have money, they spend it on relative luxuries like TV and eating out. Even subsidizing investments don't work as well as one would expect. What does work is making it easy or even forcing investment/savings. There's the story of one woman who takes out loans at 20+% interest and deposits them in a savings account at 4% interest which seems stupid but it's her ingenious way of disciplining herself. She knows she wouldn't voluntarily save on her own but she needs to make the monthly payments on the loan. She's paying someone to force her to save.

u/phdre · 1 pointr/changemyview

I recommend a book called Poor Economics which deals directly with the idea that being poor is 'the poor's own fault.'

There are poverty traps and institutional frameworks which may conspire in a way to make life very difficult. It may not take a lot for an individual to be able to improve their economic situation - even a one time no strings attached payment can strongly improve a poor individual's economic situation. Source

Page 19 and onwards of this document provide answers to each one of your issues.

u/minhthemaster · 1 pointr/Economics

Any good info on the longterm consequences of this? Poor Economics would seem to recommend NOT doing this.

u/Kirkaine · -1 pointsr/explainlikeimfive

That's a monster of a question. Hell, development economics is an entire academic field, you might as well ask 'ELI5: Physics'. Anyone who seriously thinks they can give you an answer here is lying to you, and probably to themselves as well.

That being said, for my money there are three books that are really required reading on the topic of how countries end up poor, plus two books that are required reading on why it's so hard to fix. I'd call them the bare minimum to call yourself literate on the subject.

  1. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Jared Diamond. Essential reading on the big (i.e. several millennia) question of how the world ended up broadly split between rich and poor. I think they made it into a documentary, that's probably worth checking out.

  2. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. If you only read one of these, make it this one. Perfect blend of big picture history and modern policy analysis.

  3. Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo. Much more micro-focused, this one is about poor people more than it's about poor countries. I mainly include it because Esther is a beast, and this is one of my favourite books of all time. Definitely worth the read.

    Two that you should read on why it's so hard to fix global poverty (Poor Economics sits at the intersection).

  4. The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for our Time, Jeffrey Sachs. Jeff Sachs is one of those names that everyone in the world should know. Read this book, end of story.

  5. The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, William Easterly. Easterly is another name everyone should know. To be honest, I don't agree with him on a whole lot of things. But pretending the other side of the debate doesn't exist is utterly moronic, and you can always learn a lot from people you disagree with.