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" The average poverty line in the fifty
countries where most of the poor live is 16 Indian rupees per person per day. 2
People who live on less than that are considered to be poor by the government of
their own countries. At the current exchange rate, 16 rupees corresponds to 36
U.S. cents. But because prices are lower in most developing countries, if the
poor actually bought the things they do at U.S. prices, they would need to spend
more—99 cents. So to imagine the lives of the poor, you have to imagine having
to live in Miami or Modesto with 99 cents per day for almost all your everyday
needs (excluding housing). It is not easy—in India, for example, the equivalent
amount would buy you fifteen smallish bananas, or about 3 pounds of low-
quality rice. Can one live on that? And yet, around the world, in 2005, 865
million people (13 percent of the world’s population) did. "
― Abhijit V. Banerjee , Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty
79
" The social psychologist Claude Steele demonstrated the power of what he calls “stereotype threat” in the U.S. context: Women do better on math tests when they are explicitly told that the stereotype that women are worse in math does not apply to this particular test; African Americans do worse on tests if they have to start by indicating their race on the cover sheet.33 Following Steele’s work, two researchers from the World Bank had lower-caste children in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh compete against high-caste children in solving mazes.34 They found that the low-caste children compete well against the high-caste children as long as caste is not salient, but once low-caste children are reminded that they are low castes competing with high-caste children (by the simple contrivance of asking them their full names before the game starts), they do much worse. The authors argue that this may be driven in part by a fear of not being evaluated fairly by the obviously elite organizers of the game, but it could just as well be the internalization of the stereotype. A child who expects to find school difficult will probably blame herself and not her teachers when she can’t understand what is being taught, and may end up deciding she’s not cut out for school—“stupid,” like most of her ilk—and give up on education altogether, daydreaming in class or, like Shantarama’s children, just refusing to go "
― Abhijit V. Banerjee , Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty
