{"id":6413,"date":"2015-08-20T05:55:35","date_gmt":"2015-08-20T05:55:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=6413"},"modified":"2015-08-20T05:55:53","modified_gmt":"2015-08-20T05:55:53","slug":"graduating-from-destitution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2015\/08\/20\/graduating-from-destitution\/","title":{"rendered":"Graduating from Destitution"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A recent\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.economist.com\/node\/21660133\">Free Exchange<\/a> column in the Economist was a feature on helping the world's most poor people to help themselves. \u00a0It begins:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\"THE poor do not just lack money. They are also often short of basic know-how, the support of functioning institutions and faith in their own abilities. \u00a0As a result, note Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo of MIT\u00a0in their book, \u201cPoor Economics\u201d (2004), it takes '<em>that much more skill, willpower and commitment<\/em>' for the poor to get ahead. \u00a0No wonder escaping extreme poverty \u2013 usually defined as living on less than $1.25 a day \u2013 is so hard.\"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It then reports a new paper by Banerjee, Duflo and others that\u00a0claims to have identified an anti-poverty strategy that works consistently. \u00a0Their conclusion is based on a seven-year, six-country study of more than 10,000 poor households. \u00a0The secret, it seems, is to hand out assets, followed by several months of cash transfers, followed by as much as two years of training and encouragement. \u00a0That formula seems to have made a lasting difference to the lives of the very poorest in countries as different as Ghana, Pakistan and Peru.<\/p>\n<p>If you want to be just a little bit encouraged by all this, you should read the full\u00a0article, or maybe even the paper. \u00a0If you prefer to think that the world's poor will always need the Western handouts that come as Aid,\u00a0or that we should all be as poor as each other \u2013 an equality of misery \u2013\u00a0then you shouldn't\u00a0bother.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A recent\u00a0Free Exchange column in the Economist was a feature on helping the world's most poor people to help themselves. \u00a0It begins: \"THE poor do not just lack money. They are also often short of basic know-how, the support of...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6413\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}