What I've been reading

Tyler Cowen's review made me pickup The Persistence of Poverty by Charles Karles and yeah, it was a wild wild ride. Any moderately well off person with active mirror neuron system will be puzzled and appalled by the persistence of poverty with no end in sight esp. in a rich country like USA leave alone Africa. We shouldn't be a relativist when it comes to understanding poverty since just by comparing African poverty we should never neglect the poverty in developed world (learnt that slowly after coming to this country) and the purpose of this book is not African poverty where mere survival is at stake. Its about poverty where survival is not at stake but about a condition where life becomes worse than death and about the political ramifications on controlling it.

Five common reason why poor remain poor are:

• Not working
• Not getting education
• No saving
• Alcoholism
• Taking risks with law.

and why they act irrationally by acting against their ticket out of poverty? or is it completely rational from their perspective? Karles builds a case for his hypothesis, whether the actions of poor rational or irrational, if so who is responsible or why any of the existing policys make little progress? And his hypothesis -  It makes sense to help poor who are on verge of success (who are more motivated to succeed) rather than poorest of the poor who need the most but aren't motived enough to succeed as they should have been. I loved his theory and it makes sense to help more the people who will succeed sooner and join the otherside to rescue more poor out of poverty and cycle can continue until an equilibrim is reached. It sounds fabulous on paper but ... try fine tuning this theory in Washington.. I hope someone in congress looks into this. I am optimistic, since the Cass Sustein and Richard Thaler (of Nudge fame) are now very influential in White House and not long ago they were unknown to the world except the academic circles ( they are now number 7 on top global thinkers).
Until the dreams comes true, we have Malcom Gladwell and the advantages of underprivileged.