Poor Economics——Reading Review
This book, Poor Economics, is written by Esther Duflo and Abhijit V.Banerjee, two economists who won the Nobel Prize in 2019. Authors introduce the cause of poverty and some economic phenomena in some rural areas.
During reading this book, I found an important sentence that encourages us to start this program ------ Poverty means more than a lack of money. It means a person loses the ability to realize his or her potential. They point out the other significant consequence of poverty —— losing the ability to achieve the things that they may be supposed to do, besides unhealthiness, hunger and death.
In the book, authors mention that an African girl may have the intelligence to be a scientist, but because of poverty, she couldn’t receive an education; she may have the potency to be a short-running athlete, but because of malnutrition, she may catch on diseases, staying healthy may become the problem she considers. We think the situation in Tibet is also an example. The young people there have deeper understanding of Thangka art than any other people in China. For they contact the Tibetan culture since they were born, Thangka culture runs in their veins. They are supposed to be the best to inherit this disappearing art. However, for there are so many Thangka artists, and they couldn’t make a living by doing this. The average year-income of the artists is even less than 3000 yuan. Therefore, they had to go out for finding other jobs. As the time goes by, the number of Thangka artists is decreasing seriously.
This book points out that the essence of poverty is the accumulation of decision-making errors caused by limited access to information. As it known to all, most rural areas lie in remote mountainous areas, which have bad metrological or geological conditions. These terrible conditions always led to poor transportations and unpopularized Internet access. It is actually these disadvantages that prevent them from getting rid of poverty.
If people in rural areas can contact information and knowledge, it is possible for them to make living with their technics. They can learn new technics, or use modern ways to draw people’s attention to their technics. Only in this way, they can support themselves, or support their families. Actually, there are plenty of governmental organizations or non-governmental organizations doing this kind of job. Pratham, an Indian NGO (non-governmental organization) mentioned in this book, focuses on the education in India, and now it is trying to develop its program to help other districts or nations in the world. Their mission is to improve children’s reading and writing ability with low cost. Sometimes when people didn’t get enough help in their young age, other NGO’s help for adults seems to be necessary.
Therefore, to help the people in rural areas, one of the most effective ways is to bring information into these areas. That is exactly how we are looking forwards to helping artists in Tibet. We knew about Rinchen ’s story, and found that would be an opportunity to start a course, inviting more Tibetan artists come to Fujian, and make the new art form available to them.
The authors also mention that there are certain situations that the government do not have enough money to help these people, for government needs to distribute the money for many necessary uses properly. As a result, the people in rural area may lose the chance to get rid of poverty because of the interrupt of financial aid. It will bring them back to their original life. Here comes to the significance of NGO. Most NGOs give assistance to a specific crowd of people, they can use almost their entire fund to help these people, besides the money that allows the organization run normally. That is the simply reason that NGO plays an important part in giving assistance to poor people effectively and continually. This book also give me the courage that I believe we are in the right track. As long as we keep on doing it, we will be able to help more people.
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