On Friday, Oct.30, as part of its weekly convocation series, Carleton College is pleased to present finance and social investment expert Jonathan Morduch. Widely cited on issues of international development, poverty, and financial access, Morduch’s lecture is entitled, “How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day.” This event, which takes place at 10:50 a.m. in the College’s Skinner Memorial Chapel, is free and open to the public.

Here in the United States, $2 is what you may pay for a cup of coffee or a trip through the drive-thru. But for billions of people around the globe, $2 (or less) is the average amount of money available to feed a family and pay medical bills and keep a roof over your head.

“Foreign aid experts, policy makers, and even celebrities have a lot to say about the population living on $1 or $2 a day,” observes Morduch. “The group we don’t often hear from is the poor themselves. As a result, most of us have little clue about how the poor manage to live on so little—so we fall back on our guesses and assumptions, and that then informs the way we think about foreign aid.” It is this premise that inspired Morduch to co-author the book “Portfolios of the Poor: How The World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day” (Princeton University Press, 2009).

“My colleagues and I set out to learn how poor families in Bangladesh, India and South Africa really manage to live on so little. Research teams spent a year getting to know families and recording their challenges, ambitions, strategies, failures, and successes,” explains Murdoch. “’How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day’ comes to conclusions that turn common assumptions upside down. Far from living hand-to-mouth, all of the families interviewed were borrowing, saving, and leading active financial lives because of their poverty, not in spite of it. One of the central conclusions is that when you live on so little and face a life of uncertainty, thinking about the future is an imperative, not a luxury. You can’t afford not to save.”

An internationally prominent development economist, Morduch has been a professor of public policy and economics at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service since 2000. He has also taught economics at Harvard, and has held fellowships or visiting positions at Stanford, Princeton, and the University of Tokyo. He holds a BA from Brown and Ph.D. from Harvard, both in economics. 

Morduch also co-wrote “The Economics of Microfinance” (MIT Press, 2005; 2nd edition 2010) and is the author of numerous articles in scholarly journals. He serves on the editorial boards of the World Bank Economic Review, the Journal of Economic Perspectives, and the Journal of Globalization and Development.

Morduch is the Managing Director of the Financial Access Initiative (www.financialaccess.org), a research group that aims to expand access to financial services among the poor in developing nations. Morduch has been chair of the United Nations Committee on Poverty Statistics and been a member of the UN Advisors Group on Inclusive Financial Sectors and the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Financial Empowerment. He advises Pro Mujer and the Grameen Foundation and is a member of SafeSave in Dhaka. In December 2008, Morduch was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Université Libre de Bruxelles in recognition of his work on microfinance.

The event is sponsored by the Carleton College Office of College Relations. For more information or disability accommodations, contact kraadt@carleton.edu. Skinner Memorial Chapel is located on First Street, between Nevada and Winona Streets, in Northfield.