Economic growth requires man power and brainpower, it seems plausible, however that whenever that spak occurs, it is more likely to catch fire if women and men are properly educated, well fed, and healthy, and if citizens feel secure and confident enough to invest in their children, and to let them leave home to get the new jobs in the city.
To the extent that we know how to remedy poverty there is not reason to tolerate the waste of lives and talent that poverty brings with it. As the book has shown, although we have no magic bullets to eradicate poverty, no one-shot cure-all, we do know a number of things about how to improve the lives of the poor.
1. Critical pieces of information and believe things that are not true (immunization, antibiotics, HIV). Inform them with things they don’t know (not like “no sex before marriage”) in an attractive and simple way (Telenovelas) in a credible medium.
2. The poor bear responsibility for too many aspects of their lives. The richer you are, the more the “right“ decisions are made for you. Small thinking and small cost today, and benefits are usually reaped in the distant future. Procrastination, as in all humans, get in the way. Their lives are already much more demanding than ours. Using the power of default options and small nudges (fortified salt, chlorine near the water resource)
3. Some markets are missing for the poor (health insurance, savings account)
4. Poor countries are not doomed to failure because they are poor, or because they have had an unfortunate history. Many of the failures have less to do with some grand conspiracy of the elites to maintain their hold on the economy and more to do with some avoidable flaws in the detailed design of policies and the ubiquitous three Is. It is possible to improve governance and policy without changing the existing social and political structures. There is tremendous scope for improvement even in “good” institutional environments and some margin for action even in bad ones.
5. Exceptions exist in what people are capable of doing.