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How a New Economics Is Helping to Solve Global Poverty
Dutton
April 2011
On Sale: April 14, 2011
320 pages ISBN: 052595189X EAN: 9780525951896 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
A leading economist and researcher report from the front
lines of a revolution in solving the world's most persistent
problem. When it comes to global poverty, people are passionate and
polarized. At one extreme: We just need to invest more
resources. At the other: We've thrown billions down a
sinkhole over the last fifty years and accomplished almost
nothing. Dean Karlan and Jacob Appel present an entirely new approach
that blazes an optimistic and realistic trail between these
two extremes. In this pioneering book Karlan and Appel combine behavioral
economics with worldwide field research. They take readers
with them into villages across Africa, India, South America,
and the Philippines, where economic theory collides with
real life. They show how small changes in banking,
insurance, health care, and other development initiatives
that take into account human irrationality can drastically
improve the well-being of poor people everywhere. We in the developed world have found ways to make our own
lives profoundly better. We use new tools to spend smarter,
save more, eat better, and lead lives more like the ones we
imagine. These tools can do the same for the impoverished.
Karlan and Appel's research, and those of some close
colleagues, show exactly how. In America alone, individual donors contribute over two
hundred billion to charity annually, three times as much as
corporations, foundations, and bequests combined. This book
provides a new way to understand what really works to reduce
poverty; in so doing, it reveals how to better invest those
billions and begin transforming the well-being of the world.
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