"There is an easy confusion between "big questions" and "big answers". It is not that because the problem of poverty is large that the solution also must be large. "
How true it is!! It is not at all essential that big problems will have big or large solutions. Many times (even in Life) big problems have small solutions. The above mentioned line in quotes was from an Interview by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo authors of the Book titled "Poor Economics: rethinking poverty and the ways to end it". Their Interview had recently appeared in Times of India Crest (Special Saturday Edition) this week (i.e. 11.06.2011): the registered user (free registration as of now) can see full interview here and others can read the gist of the interview below:
Abhijit V Banerjee and Esther Duflo are among the most respected, watched, and discussed economists in the world today. Banerjee is currently the Ford Foundation Professor of Economics at MIT. Duflo, is Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at MIT. In 2003, the duo co-founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT, which is best known for its pioneering efforts in conducting randomised control trials to test the real-world effectiveness of interventions believed to alleviate poverty. Their new book ‘Poor Economics: rethinking poverty and the ways to end it’ powerfully argues for a focus on the “smaller” questions in development. They make a case for more evidence-based policy-making , and warn that a great deal of development policy today hinges on “the three Is: ideology, ignorance, inertia.” The authors discussed their new book with Rukmini Shrinivasan in an email interview.
The success stories you talk of are of modest successes - how school attendance can go up, how to promote mosquito net usage etc - but we aren't seeing mass educational or health transformation. The NYU economist Bill Easterly calls this a lowering of ambitions. But do you think that these 'quiet revolutions' add up?
Not only do they add up, by themselves they can also have effects that would put some of the big macro reforms to shame. Consider the impact of de-worming, for example. The 20 per cent increase in wages resulting from de-worming is more than the effect of many years of wage growth in a country like Kenya. There is an easy confusion between "big questions" and "big answers". It is not that because the problem of poverty is large that the solution also must be large.
You say in the book that it is possible to improve governance and policy without changing the existing social and political structures. Aren't you running the risk of enraging mass movements across the world currently engaged in those very transformative processes?
We are not saying that you cannot change the world through a revolution. Just that really transformative revolutions are few and far between, hard to predict, and even harder to engineer. The question is, what do you do while waiting for the revolution? Is there anything useful we can do? What we are pointing out is that there are lots of changes that can happen at the margins, within the broad institutional structure that is in place. It is also possible that these changes can pave the way for more. We show that simple interventions can affect the way people vote, for example, making them more likely to vote on issues and less likely to vote according to ethnicity or castes.
You say that the poor often take bad decisions, but the richer you get, the more 'right' decisions have already been made for you.
Our point is that people in rich countries (and also rich people in poor countries) should become aware of something that they generally ignore about the poor: that the poor actually bear much more responsibility for many aspects of their lives than the rich. If you are poor, you have no water at home, let alone clean water. If you are rich, you can just open the tap and get clean water. If you are poor, you don't have a salary, you are selfemployed, or a casual worker. You worry everyday whether you will earn enough to feed your family. You have no safe place to save. All of this makes their everyday life so much more stressful that it is no surprise that the poor don't always make correct decisions. No one in that position could. It is possible to make life easier for the poor by trying to make the 'right choices' the easier ones.
