Radically Small Thinking
Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty by Abhijit Banerjee & Esther Duflo
Review
Poverty
Latest
Review
Making Education Relevant Where You Least Expect It
The IBT education program in India better prepares students for future opportunities than traditional teaching.
Antipoverty Apps
mPowering has created an app that awards goods and services to individuals facing extreme poverty when they make beneficial choices.
Social Entrepreneurship Takes Off in Brazil
Brazilian entrepreneurs are leveraging their deep intellectual, social, and natural resources to drive greater prosperity and create wealth.
Most Popular
Design Thinking for Social Innovation
By working closely with the clients and consumers, design thinking allows high-impact solutions to social problems to bubble up from below rather than being imposed from the top.
The Problem With Fair Trade Coffee
Fair Trade-certified coffee is growing in sales, but strict certification requirements are resulting in uneven economic advantages for coffee growers and lower quality coffee for consumers.
Microfinance Misses Its Mark
Despite the hoopla over microfinance, it doesn't cure poverty. But stable jobs do. If societies are serious about helping the poorest of the poor, they should stop investing in microfinance and start supporting large, labor-intensive industries.
In Microfinance, Clients Must Come First
Few microfinance institutions articulate what, exactly, their ultimate goals are and how to achieve them. If the goal of microfinance is to alleviate poverty, the authors say, then MFIs should focus on helping their clients build successful enterprises, rather than on making more and bigger loans.
Romanticizing the Poor
Market solutions to poverty, which include services and products targeting consumers at the “bottom of the pyramid,” portray poor people as creative entrepreneurs and discerning consumers. Yet this rosy view of poverty-stricken people is not only wrong, but also harmful.