Acknowledgments

We became development economists because of our mothers, Nirmala

Banerjee and Violaine Duflo. In their lives and their work they each
constantly express an unwillingness to live with the injustice that they
see in the world. We would have had to be deaf and blind to escape
their influence.
Our fathers, Dipak Banerjee and Michel Duflo, taught us the im-
portance of getting the argument right. We do not always measure up
to the exacting standard of precision they set for themselves, but we
came to understand why it is the right standard.
The genesis of this book was a conversation in 2005 with Andrei
Shleifer, who was then editing the Journal of Economic Perspectives. He
asked us to write something about the poor. While we were writing
that piece, which was eventually called “The Economic Lives of the
Poor,” we realized that this could be a way to bring together the many
disparate facts and ideas that we have spent our lives trying to fathom.
Max Brockman, our agent, then persuaded us that there might be in-
terest in publishing a book stemming from this piece.
Many of those facts and ideas came from others: From those who
taught us, mentored us, challenged us; from our coauthors, coeditors,
students, and friends; from our colleagues in the Abdul Latif Jameel
Poverty Action Lab; and from the many people we have worked with
in governments and development organizations around the world. Any
list of more specific influences is necessarily going to be incomplete,
276 | ACKNOWLED GMENTS

even unfair. However, we would still like to acknowledge Josh Angrist,

Rukmini Banerji, Annie Duflo, Neelima Khetan, Michael Kremer, An-
dreu Mas Colell, Eric Maskin, Sendhil Mullainathan, Andy Newman,
Rohini Pande, Thomas Piketty, and Emmanuel Saez, who, in their own
individual ways, did more to shape the thoughts that went into this
book than they probably realize. We hope that they are not entirely put
off by the result.
We benefited immensely from the comments of a number of people
on earlier drafts of the book: Daniel Cohen, Angus Deaton, Pascaline
Dupas, Nicholas Kristof, Greg Lewis, Patrick McNeal, Rohini Pande,
Ian Parker, Somini Sengupta, Andrei Shleifer, and Kudzai Takavarasha.
Emily Breza and Dominic Leggett read through every chapter several
times and came up with important ways to improve the book. The
book is immensely better for that, though probably not as good as they
could have made it if we had been less impatient to get it done. Our
editor at PublicAffairs, Clive Priddle, was wonderful to work with: The
book came to life when he took charge.