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

The winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics upend the most common assumptions about how economics works in this gripping and disruptive portrait of how poor people actually live.

Why do the poor borrow to save? Why do they miss out on free life-saving immunizations, but pay for unnecessary drugs? In Poor Economics, Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, two award-winning MIT professors, answer these questions based on years of field research from around the world. Called "marvelous, rewarding" by the Wall Street Journal, the book offers a radical rethinking of the economics of poverty and an intimate view of life on 99 cents a day. Poor Economics shows that creating a world without poverty begins with understanding the daily decisions facing the poor.

Abhijit V. Banerjee is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

Esther Duflo is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

Together, they are the winners of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics and coauthors of Good Economics for Hard Times. They have contributed to outlets as varied as Nature, NPR’s Planet Money, the New York Times, and Econometrica, among others, and are frequent contributors to the French and Indian press.