Culture November 11, 2020

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo open Poor Economics, their new treatise on development economics, by citing an experiment conducted on University of Pennsylvania students. Researchers paid students $5 to read one of two brochures about global poverty, then turned around and solicited a donation from the student. One brochure emphasized the magnitude of the problem using numbers—three million malnourished children in Malawi, eleven million in Ethiopia, etc.—while the other simply focused on the plight of one poor child, “Rokia,” whose fate could be transformed with the education and basic medical care that came with a donation of just a few