The girl who wanted to be a truck driver, and other tales

If you are in the mood for a children's picture book that talks about poverty in a thoughtful and direct manner and through the lens of social justice, Poor Economics for Kids should be at the top of your to-read pile. Sensitively written by Esther Duflo and illustrated by Cheyenne Olivier, it breaks down complex concepts without ever talking down to the reader.

- Chintan Girish Modi

The book is based on material that was presented earlier in Poor Economics: Rethinking Poverty and the Ways to End It (2011), which Duflo co-authored with husband and colleague Abhijit Banerjee. Together, they won the Nobel Prize for Economics (shared with Michael Kremer) in 2019. That book was written for adults, out of a desire "to knit together a coherent story of how poor people live their lives".

In retrospect, it is not surprising that Duflo chose to write a children's book on the same subject. Much before she met Banerjee, when she was six years old, she read about Kolkata in a comic book on Mother Teresa that presented the city as densely populated and filled with misery. However, when she visited in her 20s, she encountered a reality that was more nuanced. She learnt that books could play an important role in how we think about places.