Study of 35,000 Households Worldwide Finds New Explanations for Poverty

Articles by David Jarmul. Photographs by Mahesh Kapila.

DURHAM -- A sweeping new review of poverty by a Duke University researcher who spent the past decade studying more than 35,000 households on four continents says policy makers are focusing too much on new ideas for lifting people out of poverty instead of coming to terms with why billions of people became poor in the first place.

"It seems almost as if we have taken it for granted that all poor people are born poor -- which they are not," writes Anirudh Krishna, whose team spent the past decade conducting thousands of interviews in nearly 400 diverse communities around the world. "A large proportion of currently poor people were not born to poverty; they have become poor within their lifetimes."

His new book, "One Illness Away: Why People Become Poor and How they Escape Poverty (Oxford University Press)," calls on government officials, economists and others to pay more attention to the everyday lives and ordinary events that underlie poverty. Beyond country-level statistics and political headlines that grab attention, he says, people in barrios and remote villages are confronting challenges whose solutions may not lie with economic growth alone. [Complete News Release]

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