Why the poor, too, focus on the here and now

The news reported the names of the recipients of the grand prize in economics.  I immediately recognized two of the three joint recipients: Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee.

The first thing that I did after reaching my office was to pull up their book that I had purchased years ago.  I remember reading it from cover to cover, and then even using it in a class. 

A couple of sticky notes were still there, and I opened one of those pages:

I immensely appreciated that book primarily because they were doing such on-the-ground work, instead of the highfalutin theorizing that drove me far away from development economics.  Over the years, I have watched quite a few interviews with the couple--who were not a couple when their research collaboration began.

I was sure that I have blogged about Duflo and Banerjee, and I have.  It seems like I bought the book after I read that essay.  The following is a copy/paste of my blog-post from May 17, 2011:
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The essay by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo has lots of observations that might challenge conventional wisdom.  Like this one, for instance:

If there is any chance that by eating a bit more the poor could start doing meaningful work and get out of the poverty trap zone, then they should eat as much as possible. Yet most people living on less than a dollar a day do not seem to act as if they are starving. If they were, surely they would put every available penny into buying more calories. But they do not. In an 18-country data set we assembled on the lives of the poor, food represents 36 to 79 percent of consumption among the rural extremely poor, and 53 to 74 percent among their urban counterparts. 

So, where else do they spend? On other basic necessities?  Not so, they add:

The poor seem to have many choices, and they don't choose to spend as much as they can on food. Equally remarkable is that even the money that people do spend on food is not spent to maximize the intake of calories or micronutrients. Studies have shown that when very poor people get a chance to spend a little bit more on food, they don't put everything into getting more calories. Instead, they buy better-tasting, more expensive calories....
All told, many poor people might eat fewer calories than we -- or the FAO -- think is appropriate. But this does not seem to be because they have no other choice; rather, they are not hungry enough to seize every opportunity to eat more. So perhaps there aren't a billion "hungry" people in the world after all....
We often see the world of the poor as a land of missed opportunities and wonder why they don't invest in what would really make their lives better. But the poor may well be more skeptical about supposed opportunities and the possibility of any radical change in their lives. They often behave as if they think that any change that is significant enough to be worth sacrificing for will simply take too long. This could explain why they focus on the here and now, on living their lives as pleasantly as possible and celebrating when occasion demands it.

Life is complicated, as much as it is beautiful.
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How awesome that their work has been recognized at this level!