(One of) the book(s) I'm currently reading... Poor Economics

Been gradually making my way through a book recently, but after seeing a review of it recently I figured that I'd post this now. The book's subject: trying to analyze the effectiveness of programs to tackle poverty. It's even got a nice spiffy website to go along with it. The book's subject:

Until Poor Economics appeared last year, the debate about aid had been broadly polarised into two positions. On the left was Jeffrey Sachs, arguing that the single biggest factor keeping poor people poor is poverty. If foreign aid can lift them out of the poverty trap long enough to free them from the disease, ignorance and debt that thwart their potential, then pretty soon they will be able to solve their own problems for themselves. On the right, William Easterly argued that the real problem isn't a poverty trap but aid itself, which creates a dependency culture that keeps the poor poor, and distorts their only real roadmap to prosperity – the free market. As Banerjee saw it, both positions owed more to polemic and conjecture than empirical evidence.

That empirical evidence is what they attempt to provide. What the reviewer found surprising, I'd argue, really shouldn't be something too surprising to anyone:

The surprise for me was the book's striking parallels between poverty in the developing world and in the UK, and its relevance to our attempts to help the poor in Hartlepool or Glasgow. When studied closely, it becomes clear that people who live on less than a dollar a day are not uniquely mysterious, but subject to the very same psychological and behavioural patterns as the rest of us.

You do, of course, need to account for higher average stress levels amongst the poor though and the consequences of that.