“We have to abandon the habit of reducing the poor to cartoon characters”

Believes in Thinking Small, Abhijit, Nobel Prize Winner for Economics says.

“We have to abandon the habit of reducing the poor to cartoon characters and take the time to really understand their lives, in all their complexity and richness.” says Abhijit.

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo have won the Nobel Prize in Economics. The Nobel Committee highlighted how their ‘experiment-based approach’ has transformed development economics of the past. Improving the human condition and alleviating poverty remain most important priority of the world today. There are 1.4 billion poor people, in that 267 million of the world’s poor are in India.

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo have chosen a different path to tackle poverty by making the poor and their decision-making vital to the development process. More than five million children have benefited from effective remedial tutoring during their studies in Tamil Nadu, India.

They managed to inspire the governments to go for more public investment in preventive health care. They see the poor people as autonomous decision-makers who are constrained by institutional, informational, monetary and logistic limitations from doing what could improve their condition. The Abhijit and Duflo team have shown that there is a need to adopt new approaches in the fight against poverty that are based on field trials rather than the failed methods of the past. They break issues into smaller questions and search for evidence about which interventions work to resolve them and seek practical ways to bring these treatments to scale.

“Poor Economics”, their book describes the choices made by people living on less than $2 a day in India. It is common for poor families to invest their entire education budget on just one child, usually a son, hoping that this child will make it through secondary school and even college. They do not pay as much attention to the other children because they think it would be a waste of resources to spread the family’s educational budget among all the children rather than making sure that at least one child reaches his goal. They suggested the government to focus on education and health care for all in the rural India.

Knowledge has the power to eradicate the poverty and ignorance.

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