Fighting poverty one experiment at a time: A review of Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo's Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty

Abstract

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo offer a coherent vision for an economics of poverty and antipoverty policy. Their economics is grounded in an effort to understand the economic and psychological complexities in the lives of poor people, informed by social experiments and field observations. Their preferred policies entail small reforms at the margin, also informed by experiments—specifically randomized control trials. While the book provides some interesting insights, I question how far its approach will get us in fighting global poverty.