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

simply told parents about the average income gains from spending one more year in school for children from backgrounds similar to theirs had a sizable positive effect on test scores,

“witch” killing

Or, as often happens in practice, the lender may decide that it is not viable to lend to the poor: Their loans would be too small to make it worthwhile.

a worldview that puts a large premium on picking a winner (and in getting everyone else in the family to back the winner). This belief creates a strange form of sibling rivalry.

But it also depends on whether she can find a job, her freedom to divorce, and her survival options in the case of divorce.

The poor, on the other hand, may well be more skeptical about supposed opportunities and the possibility of any radical change in their lives. They often behave as if they think that any change that is significant enough to be worth sacrificing for will simply take too long. This could explain why they focus on the here and now, on living their liv

Governments exist to a large extent to solve problems that markets cannot solve—we

Gram Vikas,

How then can more “good jobs” be created? Clearly, it would help if it were easier to migrate to cities, so policies on urban land use and low-income housing are obviously vital. Less obviously, effective social safety nets, consisting of both public assistance and market insurance, can make migration easier by reducing dependence on social network