Life on a dollar a day
Imagine, for a moment, that you must live on 99 cents per day. How would you manage it? For roughly 850 million people around the globe, this is not a hypothetical question; those people really have daily purchasing power roughly equal to what a dollar buys in the United States. And yet they carve out lives, run businesses and raise children. Frequently, though, aid programs are not tailored to the contours of daily life among the poor. “You have to understand how the poor live,” says Esther Duflo PhD ’99, the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at MIT. “But the way policymaking is done is usually miles away from that.” For instance, shipping vast quantities of grain to poor countries, a common aid practice, is inefficient because the poor are reluctant to eat such repetitious meals. The poor often shun health care until given the...