Talking about the problems of the world without talking about some accessible solutions is the way to paralysis rather than progress. This is why it is really helpful to think in terms of concrete problems which can have specific answers,

Can one live on that? And yet, around the world, in 2005, 865 million people (13 percent of the world’s population) did.

But it also depends on whether she can find a job, her freedom to divorce, and her survival options in the case of divorce. These contingencies, in turn, depend on the legal, social, political, and economic environment she and her husband inhabit,

This belief in the S-shape means that unless parents are unwilling to treat their children differently from one another, it makes sense for them to put all their educational eggs in the basket of the child they perceive to be the most promising, making sure that she gets enough education, rather than spreading the investment evenly across all their

the Bangladeshi women who benefited from the program in Matlab were heavier and taller than those in the comparison group and also earned more.

this whole book is in the form of an extended answer.

Family decisionmaking came to be seen as the result of a bargaining process among family members (or at least between the two parents).

“When we have money, they don’t have fertilizer. When they have fertilizer, we don’t have money.”

the poor might appear to believe in all kinds of things, but there is not much conviction behind many of those beliefs.