Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for their work on global poverty, offer a new approach to understanding why people remain poor and what can be done about it. They reject both the view that the poor are lazy and the view that they are helpless victims of structural forces. Instead, through randomized experiments and careful observation in countries from India to Kenya, they reveal how poor people make decisions under constraints that outsiders barely understand. Why do poor families often refuse free immunizations for their children? Why do they sometimes eat less nutritious food when incomes rise? Why are some development interventions wildly successful while similar ones fail? Banerjee and Duflo answer these questions with evidence rather than ideology. They work at MIT's Poverty Action Lab, where they've refined experimental methods for testing development interventions. The book combines scholarly rigor with vivid storytelling about individual families, giving faces to statistics. Readers will come away with both humility about easy answers and optimism about what carefully designed programs can achieve. This is economics at its best: clear-eyed, empirical, and focused on human welfare.