Esther Duflo

Esther Duflo, Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at MIT, and Abhijit Banerjee, International Professor of Economics at MIT, authors of Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, talk about the complicated nature of poverty and how understanding poverty contributes to better policy.

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Poverty continues to raise questions for economists, who have differing viewpoints on its source and its solution. A new book out by two MIT Economists moves away from the question of why poverty toward looking at how poor people behave and survive. They are asking questions like, "why would a man in Morocco, who doesn’t have enough to eat, buy at television set?" and "Does having lots of children make you poorer?"