Poor Economics — Rethinking Poverty & Ways to End It by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo; Random House; Price: Rs.499; 293 pp
Poverty and ways and means to eradicate it, has become a global industry. Billions of words have been written on the subject and thousands of prescriptions tried and tested without much success. Of course there are several nation states such as China, South Korea, and perhaps Thailand among others, which have broken out of the vicious cycle of illiteracy, ignorance and poverty and attained middle income status within the latter half of the 20th century.
Moreover, it is pertinent to bear in mind that less than 200 years ago, the grinding poverty and income inequality of contemporary third world proportions was as characteristic of Britain, France, Russia and most European countries. Therefore, formulae or prescriptions for breaking out of poverty do exist and have worked. Nevertheless despite numerous examples and precedents, in 21st century India and several Asian and African countries, the incidence of poverty, economic disparity and deprivation on a massive scale stubbornly persists.
The overwhelming mass of available evidence suggests that nations which prosper are those in which the wise and good have assiduously built strong and sustainable institutions of governance and public order — they don’t fall like manna from heaven. This is the subtext of Poor Economics — Rethinking Poverty, written by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)-based scholar-researchers who have made a valiant effort to go beyond common prescriptions and silver bullet solutions relating to economic development, to examine the root causes of pervasive and seemingly ineradicable poverty and inequality in third world nations, despite the easy availability of roadmaps charted by economists and social engineers of newly prosperous countries.
To this end, this duo’s unique contribution to development economics is establishment of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-Pal, estb.2003), described as a “network of affiliated professors in five offices around the world who are united by their use of randomised control trials to answer questions critical to poverty alleviation”. Its mission is to examine and re-assess existing dogma and nostrums relating to economic development and “to reduce poverty by ensuring that policy is based on scientific evidence”.
The most striking difference between industrial nations of the first world and struggling countries of the third world is between their education systems. According to your reviewer, irrational government and societal neglect of education — especially primary and vocational education — is the prime cause of widespread poverty and poor productivity in the developing nations, and India in particular. And a seminal chapter titled ‘Top of the Class’ in Poor Economics deeply investigates this hypothesis.
“Schools are available. In most countries they are free, at least at the primary level. Most children are enrolled. And yet in the various surveys that we have conducted around the world, child absentee rates vary between 14 and 50 percent,” observe the authors. To explain this curious phenomenon, they proceed to discuss the merits of two dominant strategies to universalise primary schooling. On the one hand, there are the “supply wallahs” such as Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute of Columbia University, who believe that by building schools en masse with foreign aid, and making them accessible by forcing parents by law to send their children to school, is the best strategy.
On the other hand are the “demand wallahs” such as William Easterly, professor of economics at New York University and author of The Elusive Quest for Growth (2001), who argue that it’s no use supplying education unless there’s clear demand for it. According to the latter group, the great majority of parents in developing countries don’t care about sending their children to school because the quality of education dispensed therein is poor, and they can’t see the benefits of such schooling against putting them to work. The precondition of universalising schooling is to raise teaching-learning standards to the extent that it’s crystal clear to parents that the benefits of their children attending school far outweigh the economic benefits derived from putting children to work for paltry wages.
The case for creating genuine demand for quality school education has been argued for over a decade in EducationWorld and Banerjee and Duflo endorse it by citing the inventive efforts — by way of providing remedial education and measuring learning outcomes in rural primaries — of the Mumbai-based NGO, Pratham which receives high praise from the authors. Given that in this age of pervasive attention deficit disorder, people skim rather than read works of scholarship and research, Poor Economics is highly recommended for its Top of the Class chapter, which explains in detail why governments all over the third world are unlikely to attain the United Nations (UN) Millennium Development Goal of primary education for all by the year 2015, and the invalid assumptions of the well-intentioned goal-setters of the UN. All bona fide educators need to read this chapter, even if not much else in the book, to understand the need for moderating rather than setting unrealistic standards in public education.
Your reviewer’s take-away from this “marvelously insightful book” (description of Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen) crammed with data, facts and illuminating case histories, is that poor people aren’t lazy, illiterate shirkers, as is comm-only believed. They need a small helping hand — half-decent public schools; well-managed, responsive primary health centres and public hospitals; responsible government officials and uncorrupt law, order and justice systems. To illustrate this point, the authors cite the sad story of Ibu Tina, who with her husband ran a prospering garments manufacturing business in Indonesia, and whose family was making its way up the steep underside of the S curve out of poverty. But a bounced cheque given to them by a trusted business acquaintance for Rupiah 20 million ($3,750 ppp) got them involved with the police, who extorted bribe money of Rupiah 4.5 million against the Rupiah 4 million recouped by the couple, and as a consequence they slipped all the way back down the S curve. Currently Ibu Tina is a single mother living in a Bandung slum barely supporting four children and her mother, by selling readymades for children.
The tragedy of the poor in third world nations is that corrupt governments and a greedy middle class are unable to summon up the energy and will to offer the small helping hand they need to climb out of poverty.
Dilip Thakore
Deadly terrain
Undercover Muslim — A Journey into Yemen by Theo Padnos; Bodley Head; Price: Rs.599; 293 pp
The fact that the Arab autocracy of Yemen has been in the eye of a political and revolutionary storm for over a year makes this book written by veteran journalist Theo Padnos, timely and interesting. Recently, Yemen’s long-serving President, Ali Abdullah Saleh, returned to the country from Saudi Arabia after surviving an assassination attempt, to be confronted with a spate of protests calling for him to quit. For 30 years he has presided over a corrupt and oppressive regime even as Yemen stagnated as one of the world’s most poverty-stricken (annual income: $2,700 ppp in 2010) countries, and descended into chaos.
Undercover Muslim, however, is a travelogue-cum-exposé written by Padnos who studied the intense brainwashing techniques employed to train and indoctrinate Western and Arab youth to transform into suicide-bombers and jihadists while studying in the Salafi academies of Yemen, where religion is all that matters. Padnos’ journey took him from the newsroom of a Yemeni newspaper to the prayer rows and lecture rooms of the country’s madrassas, and from covert jeep rides into the sacred mountains to a stint in an overcrowded prison. These testing experiences gave him an insight into Yemeni culture, continuously frozen in a time warp because of the stranglehold of regressive interpretations of Islam and the Quran. At the same time, Padnos also provides insights into how and why disillusioned and angry young men often give up the material comforts of Western consumerist societies where there is no room for divinity, to seek “knowledge and simplicity of life” in the desert-blown towns of Yemen.
Although a convert to Islam, the author confesses that it’s not a spiritual calling. He professed his faith to gain access to Yemen’s most forbidden Salafist institutions — seminaries rarely, if ever, visited by non-believers — and mosques and madrassas that breed devout radicals and, in some cases, violent jihadists. As a convert, he was able to travel and do all the things that converts usually do, but admits his inability to accept the archaic tenets of Islam and the Sharia, particularly as narrowly interpreted by the clergy in Yemen.
“Over the past ten years, the world has been watching the nation of Yemen drift into the abyss. It’s a fascinating spectacle. The disappearance of drinking water, the staggering rate of population increase, the corruption, the floods, the cussedness of the Yemeni president, the hollow institutions, the rivalrous tribes, the often terrifying crowds in the streets, the similarly terrifying mosque speeches — to date these elements have somehow not produced the general systems failure everyone knows is coming. But they have certainly ratcheted up the tension,” writes Padnos.
Certainly he is well-qualified to chronicle this unprecedented account of life in the jihad factories of one of the most backward nations of the Arab world. With a doctorate in comparative literature, Padnos has lived and studied both in Syria and Yemen, and eventually joined the annual flow of alienated and frustrated youth who flee to this spartan country in search of meaning, spiritual solace and “submissive wives” as ordained by the Quran. They come in expectation of experiencing and practising the most powerful, pure and ancient form of Islam in the rugged isolation of the Yemeni mountains. This narration is in the form of a travelogue interspersed with a commentary on the practice of Islam in the most austere seminaries of the Muslim world, and under the guidance of Salafi (Sunni fundamentalist) imams.
Overly focused on the author’s quest for unraveling the complexity of radical Islam, this book sheds little light on the grim living conditions in the country. Readers seeking to understand how youth are actually brainwashed into becoming suicide-bombers and soldiers of Islam are also likely to be disappointed. The most interesting feature of Undercover Muslim is that it illumines the world of die-hard seekers of Islam, and what may have been left unsaid can be read between the lines.
A book recommended for those who want an armchair experience of the harsh realities inside the jihad factories of one of the world’s bleakest nations, where life is nasty, brutish and short.
Huned Contractor