A new book tells one of the world's most important yet invisible stories: how over two billion people live
by David Goldblatt / September 4, 2009 / Leave a commentPublished in September 2009 issue of Prospect Magazine
Above: Micro-credit under discussion at a village meeting in Bangladesh. Photo by Abhilash Medhi, 2009 AP Fellow. Location: Barisal, Bangladesh. Partner: BERDO
Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day
by Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford and Orlanda Ruthven (Princeton University Press)
So far, the economic life of the world’s poor has merely been quantified and aggregated. Some of the texture of everyday life in the world’s favellas has been documented, but what no one has done is to ask those people the pressing questions, “How do you do it? How do you manage on two dollars a day?” Two dollars a day is the UN’s current baseline definition of absolute poverty and over two and a half billion people in the global south are surviving on it.
Asking those questions is precisely what the authors of Portfolios of the Poor have done—and we are all in their debt, for the result is something astonishingly revealing. Over a six year period, they wrote year-long financial diaries with 300 poor households, both rural and urban, in Bangladesh, India and South Africa. The detailed records of their financial ins and outs were sufficiently robust for the researchers to construct balance sheets and cash flow statements for every family.
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