[3] Poor Economics lays out a middle ground between purely market-based solutions to global poverty, versus "grand development plans."

Instead, the authors help to understand how the poor really think and make decisions on such matters as education, healthcare, savings, entrepreneurship, and a variety of other issues.

Abhijit V. Banerjee is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at MIT and a founder of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL).

He concludes by arguing as follows: It is, perhaps, not too difficult to understand why the prescription of Poor Economics has enjoyed as much circulation as it has, in particular among metropolitan development policy-making elites, although increasingly also elsewhere.

It appeals to powerful but flawed metropolitan predispositions: a desire to "fix" things with simpleminded mono-causal reasoning, allied with the conviction that technology, through the analysis of data using randomised trials, makes it possible to do so.

Its technocratic premises, its naïve view of politics and society, and its unselfconscious do-goodism make for a self-affirming picture of the world.11 It is unfortunate that it does so little to explain it.He also includes a footnote with the attempt at humour One can think of at least three interpretations of the title, not all favourable to the authors..[21] Poor Economics won the 2011 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.