Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo have won the £30,000 FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year award for their book, Poor Economics. Follow this link to read excerpts from the book.
Here’s more about the book: “Through a careful analysis of a very rich body of evidence, including the hundreds of randomized control trials that Banerjee and Duflo’s lab has pioneered, they show why the poor, despite having the same desires and abilities as anyone else, end up with entirely different lives. Through their work, Banerjee and Duflo look at some of the most surprising facets of poverty: why the poor need to borrow in order to save, why they miss out on free life-saving immunizations but pay for drugs that they do not need, why they start many businesses but do not grow any of them, and many other puzzling facts about living with less than 99 cents per day.”
Below, we’ve collected the shortlisted authors. Banerjee and Duflo both direct the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT. You can see charts and excerpts from their book at this page.
Check out the shortlisted at the award site: The authors of the five other books on the shortlist each receive £10,000. The other shortlisted books are: Exorbitant Privilege by Barry Eichengreen; Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt; The Quest by Daniel Yergin; Triumph of the City by Edward Glaeser; and Wilful Blindess by Margaret Heffernan.