A different kind of story book | Nobel Prize-winning economist Esther Duflo‘s ‘Poor Economics for Kids’

Last year, I met the members of a Gurugram-based children’s book club to discuss a picture book I’d written about child rights. While talking about the right to education, one tween said, “If poor children don’t go to school because they need to fetch water or work, they and their families are choosing not to get an education. How can they complain then?”

I was reminded of this while reading Abhijit Banerjee’s foreword in economist Esther Duflo and illustrator Cheyenne Olivier’s recently released, Poor Economics for Kids. He writes: “… the discussion in the world about the poor is wrong-headed because it ignores just how hard it is to be poor and therefore blames them for the problems of their own lives.”

Originally published in France, the English translation was released in India last week by Juggernaut, with five of the stories translated into Hindi, Bengali, Kannada,Tamil, and Marathi. It will also be published as individual picture books by Pratham Books.

Expanding the S curve

Duflo and Banerjee’s lifetime work in trying to understand the specific problems that come with poverty and to find solutions earned the husband and wife team, along with American economist Michael Kremer, the 2019 Nobel Prize for Economics. A few years earlier, their research also came out as a book, Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty (2011), which reveals why the poor, despite having the same aspirations and abilities as anyone else, end up with entirely different lives.

“I realised it was the real life stories that people found appealing in Poor Economics, and that they understood certain concepts after reading them,” Duflo, a professor of economics at MIT and Collège de France, tells me over a Zoom call. She recalls reading books on poverty as a child; they stayed with her despite being filled with stereotypes. But the fact that they stayed with her made Duflo want to write for kids, an audience for whom very little has been crafted around the topic of poverty.

Through 10 loosely interconnected stories, young readers are introduced to Nilou, Tsongai, Imai, Afia, Bibir and a host of other characters as they go about their daily lives, looking for ways to overcome issues such as food insecurity, climate change, deforestation, and under-resourced schools. They are composites based on the lives and experiences of people from around the world. Duflo says it was important to her that the tales were not tied to a particular place, culture, religion or race, and so they are set in an unnamed, imaginary village free of cultural and geographical markers.

The characters are rendered in a startling array of skin tones: from yellow to green to blue by Olivier. The illustrations are filled with bold shapes and colours. The trees are striped, the ground is full of patterns, and is often curved. “I took the S curve from poor economics and turned it into a beautiful and meaningful element [the ground] that evokes the highs and lows in the stories and characters’ lives,” Olivier explains. The S curve, I found on further research, represents the relationship between a person’s income now and their future income based on the investments they can make in their health, education, and overall well-being.

‘Young people are part of the solution’

Was it hard turning decades of work into stories for children? Duflo admits that writing for kids is much harder than writing for adults, but that “it was clear to me what needed to be touched upon for each topic and the idea for some stories, like Nilou’s, have been within me for a long time”.

‘Nilou Skips School’ tells the story of a young girl who is unable to keep up with her school lessons and plays truant. Her under-resourced teacher struggles to help the students, but a social worker trains the older children of the village to teach Nilou and her friends.

The stories are non-didactic and devoid of heavy handed platitudes, instead using dialogue and a succinct narrative style to move things along. An essay at the end of each story explains the underlying concept, opening up the books to a wider group of children. “Younger ones can have the stories read to them by an adult, and leave it at that, while older children can read the story with the accompanying essay on their own,” says Duflo.

So what does she want readers to take away from the stories? “Too often in children’s literature, the child is either an innocent victim or they are in charge of saving the whole world,” she replies. “We wanted to make clear that young people are part of the solution. There are things you can do, but you’re never alone. You’re part of a society.”

This comes through strongly in stories like ‘Thumpa in the Shade of the Trees’ based on the Chipko movement. When a village elder’s personal story inspires a child to save trees from being felled by lumberjacks, she follows suit. And soon the other children and then adults join in.

Creating empathy

The creators are aware that in India, a book for children in English will most likely reach readers of far greater privilege and wealth than the characters in the book. “While the book’s reader may not have had similar experiences, we hope the stories will make them realise that these kids are not all that different to them,” Duflo says.

And perhaps that is why the young tween reader I met at the book club should read these stories. To understand that Nilou, Afia and Neso are not that different from him, that they have as much a right to live a life of dignity and quality as he does. That understanding and empathy is perhaps the first step in the journey towards bridging the gap that exists between them.