Poor knew how to escape from Poverty

Here is a book review by BIBEK DEBROY on “Out of Poverty” by Paul Polak.

It is worth to note that “He has written, and has been written about. But this is his first book. “I hate books about poverty that make you feel guilty, as well as dry, academic ones that put you to sleep. Working to alleviate poverty is a lively, exciting field capable of generating new hope and inspiration, not feelings of gloom and doom. Learning the truth about poverty generates disruptive innovations capable of enriching the lives of rich people even more than those of poor people.” This is not an academic and dry book. It is part autobiographical, partly about IDE and mostly about the poor and how their lives were transformed. It is anecdotal, and written in a style impossible to describe in a review. Without any qualification, this is a book everyone should read”.

And “Says Polak, “The most important poverty eradication myth is that we can donate people out of poverty. Incredibly, Jeffrey Sachs, head of the UN Millennium Development Goals Initiative, believes that people who live on a dollar a day are too poor to invest their own money to move out of poverty… But this type of subsidy solution is endemic in the development world... To move out of poverty, poor people have to invest their own time and money. The path out of poverty lies in releasing the energy of Third World entrepreneurs.”

See my other post here