Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty

Banerjee and Duflo, later joint Nobel laureates, wrote the book that argued development economics had been asking the wrong question: not "what policies work" at the country level, but "what works for whom, under what conditions" at the level of specific interventions. Their method — randomised controlled trials in the field — is the transposition of biomedical evidence standards to social policy. The book is a patient tour through specific studies: bednets, school attendance, microcredit, vaccines. For product direction the transfer is useful on two levels: the habit of treating large claims with specific scepticism, and the operational model of learning by experiment at small scale before scaling. Read alongside Demirdjian for the medical history of the method.