How The 3 Nobel Winners For Economics Upended The Fight Against Poverty
How does their approach work in practice? And why is it considered so ground-breaking?
This year's Nobel Prize in economics was awarded to three scholars who revolutionized the effort to end global poverty: Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo of MIT and Michael Kremer of Harvard are essentially credited with applying the scientific method to an enterprise that, until recently, was largely based on gut instincts.
But how does their approach work in practice? Why is it considered so ground-breaking? And how much has it actually changed life for the world's poorest? Here's an explainer.
Don't Assume – Test!
For decades, programs and policies to help the poor have largely been designed around what seemed like reasonable assumptions:
Kids in poor areas can't afford new textbooks — so surely giving them free
