Assignment #3

My concept of a poverty trap did not change after reading this article, as really a poverty trap is anything that causes the poor to perpetually stay poor. This can be a lack of food and nutrition as described in Poor Economics, or the lack of time and emphasis on short term goals rather than long term goals as in the Slate article. The problem with the concept of a poverty trap is the number of things that might cause it. For example, a poverty trap could be caused by a lack of nutrition, healthcare, and the problems discussed in the Slate article; a theory that could explain all of these would have to be sufficiently vague and as a result couldn't be disproven experimentally. Competing theories of poverty traps also make it difficult to come away with anything particularly useful about the world regarding them, as we are significantly unsure what causes them, so how can we even start to implement policy based on the idea of a poverty trap? As for additional information that the story could have included, or others like it in general, a good description of the experiment''s methodology is also useful in order to effectively critique the experiment. Knowing the results of the experiment alone isn't enough to properly critique the experiment to even begin to determine it's validity.