The urge to reduce the poor to a set of clichés has been with us for as long as there has been poverty: The poor appear, in social theory as much as in literature, by turns lazy or enterprising, noble or thievish, angry or passive, helpless of self-sufficient. People sell simple formulas: “Free markets for the poor”, “Make human rights substantial”, “Deal with conflict first”, “Give more money to the poorest” “Foreign aid kills development”. These ideas all have important elements of truth, but they rarely have much space for average poor women and men, with their hopes and doubts, limitations and aspirations, beliefs and confusion. The poor are personae of some uplifting anecdote or tragic episode, to be admired or pitied, but not as a source of knowledge, not as people to be consulted about what they think or want (objectified).
The economics of poverty get mistaken for poor economics: Because the poor possess very little it is assumed that there is nothing interesting about their economic existence. Unfortunately, this misunderstanding severely undermines the fight against global poverty: simple problems beget simple solutions. The anti-poverty policies are filled with instant miracles that proved less than miraculous. To progress, we have to abandon the habit of reducing the poor to cartoon characters and take time to really understand their lives, in all their complexity and richness.
People who live with less than 36-dollar cents per day are consider poor. People who are that poor are just like the rest of us in almost every way; we have the same desires and fears. The poor are no less rational- quite the contrary-because they have so little, we often find them putting much careful thought into their choices.
Living with 99 cents a day means you have limited access to information- and you don’t know certain facts that the rest of the world take for granted. It means living in a world whose institutions are not built for someone like you. What does someone who cannot read make of a health insurance product that doesn’t cover a lot of unpronounceable diseases? It means going to vote when your entire experience of the political system is a lot of promise, not delivered; and not having anywhere safe to keep your money, because what the bank manager can make from your little saving wont cover his cost of handling it. Etc..
No single lever will solve every problem. This book try’s to explain why so many magic bullets of yesterday have ended up as today´s failed ideas. It tells the hope lies; why token subsidies might have more than toke effects; how to better market insurance; why less may be more in education; why good jobs matter for growth.
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