Why are some countries poor? If your answer is "Because the gubbermint is keepin' the poor man down" then you might be wrong. If your answer is "Because genocidal, white, European colonial powers established neoimperial lines of control" then you might be wrong. If your answer is malaria, or poverty traps, or history of political and economic institutions... you might be right, but that might not be the whole picture.
"Why are some countries poor?" is probably best answered by questioning those living in poor countries and doing some experiments with them! You can't navel gaze your way to the moon, so you're sure as hell not going to navel gaze your way to ending global poverty.
Poor Economics asks us to approach the problem of global poverty from a realist perspective, as well. You're not going to solve global warming by building a giant solar shade in earth orbit, so why do people think that you can solve global poverty by throwing a couple of trillion dollars around? Instead, just like how with global warming you try three dozen different solutions, you must try and experiment with three dozen different institutions across the global South.
The basic framework to Poor Economics' experiments is this: Being poor is caused by not having money. Not having money is caused by lacking jobs, capital, or savings. Convincing people to get jobs, or teach their kids how to read, or to save money instead of spending it on booze is not as obvious as you would expect. Interventions have no effects at all or even backfire effects, and whatever your ideological flavor is probably won't help you predict what those effects are. Instead, you have to experiment with randomized control trials and systematic measurement.
To put it in another way,
poverty problem --> Intervention --> Randomized Control Trial --> 0.05% of poverty alleviated
This answer is obviously immensely unsatisfying. It has no buggy man. There are no demons for us to hunt and burn. We can't hoist Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk by their asses and beat them with sticks for not putting money into countries with astronomical economic event horizons. We can't blame the commies, either, at least not completely.
Instead, we have to do the work. Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo show us how. After all, that's why they won the Nobel Prize.
