Sublime

“three I’s” problem: ideology, ignorance, inertia.

randomized trials

Give your money Chennupati Jagadish is one of Australia's leading scientists. Yet he grew up dirt poor in a small village in southern India. In fact, he might never have gone to high school if it weren't for a kind teacher who invited him to live with his family and study. Now, there are plenty of people who get to the top of the tree only to forge

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

Education economist Greg Duncan,

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

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

Misperception can be critical. In reality, there should not be an education-based poverty trap: Education is valuable at every level. But the fact that parents believe that the benefits of education are S-shaped leads them to behave as if there were a poverty trap, and thereby inadvertently to create one.