This is Sen at his most philosophical, and I think he is basically correct on this point, namely that there is more to the standard of living concept than at first meets the eye.

Here's one anti-poverty program which really seems to work.

The stress of being poor can take a toll on decision-making and cognitive skills.  This video is a look at some recent research on how this might be a big problem.

Sometimes the poor have so many problems that all of them go unfixed.  Decision-making at the margin doesn't always operate in their favor and here is a look at why.

One of my favorite papers in development economics is an empirical look at how poor families spend their money; let's take a look at what that paper says.

What do we know about how extremely poor families earn their money?  This video focuses on families earning $2 a day or less.

A prescient economist who started a lot of the trends in current development work, including original data gathering and careful natural experiments.  He started off as an abstract monetary theorist and ended up measuring rice consumption in rural...

What do the data -- especially from randomized control trials -- suggest about the effectiveness of microcredit?

ROSCAs and chit funds are common throughout the developing world. In this lecture we look at how these financial programs work and who uses them.