But those who take the time to read the new book "Portfolios of the Poor: How the World's Poor Live on $2 a Day," written in part by economist Jonathan Morduch of NYU Wagner, are likely to come away with a far better understanding of the financial lives of the world's poor -- and the notion that their financial lives are, in fact, surprisingly complicated.

The book, newly published by Princeton University Press, has particular relevance for the development and anti-poverty community, and tackles the fundamental question of how the poor make ends meet. The work is based on the financial diaries of more than 250 families in Bangladesh, India, and South Africa compiled from bi-weekly interviews over the course of one year. 

On May 7, 2009, Morduch launched the book -- which he wrote and researched with Daryl Collins, Stuart Rutherford and Orlanda Ruthven-- at an event cosponsored by New York University's Africa House and the Financial Access Initiative, a research consortium that Professor  Morduch heads. Other participants included Professor Rogan Kersh, associate dean at Wagner, Matthew Bishop, chief business writer/American business editor for The Economist, Bill Easterly, NYU professor of economics and author of "The White Man's Burden," and Yaw Nyarko, NYU professor of economics and director of Africa House.

The book refutes the assumptions people often make about the very poor, such as that they fail to plan for the future or save for a rainy day. The opposite is true. In their case, necessity is the mother of financial savvy -- which, as Easterly noted (and The Economist.com reported) far exceeds that of some of the celebrities and aid workers who speak on their behalf. "Portfolios of the Poor" finds that the poor are active money managers. People in South Africa, for example, participated in informal, locally operated savings club, in part to help them fight the temptation to spend in the short-term or because they lacked access to traditional banking. Other households, as in Bangladesh, used shopkeeper credit, saved with a money guard, accepted interest free loans from relatives and friends, and relied upon remittances.

In addition, the authors found that the poor don't usually earn a steady $2 a day as many might imagine. Rather, the book reports that the more typical income stream at the lowest economic strata includes many unpredictable highs and lows, also a lack of  basic financial tools to help them manage those ups and downs.
 
Morduch and Collins shared stories about Hamid and Khadeja, a Bangladeshi couple who earned only $70 a month but were active money managers. Another voluntary financial diarist, Pumza, a sheep intestine vendor in South Africa, never knew how much she would sell on a daily basis, and was forced to use informal and often unreliable financial tools to address her irregular cash flows. Still another interviewee, Nomsa, an elderly South African woman supporting her five grandchildren on a government old-age grant of $115 a month, managed to save $40 a month using informal mechanisms.

In other words, the poor are doing all they can with what they have. They are saving, borrowing, managing risk and looking toward the future. But they could do more with better financial tools. It's not financial savvy they lack, but access to financial services

To some, such as Easterly, who made brief remarks, "Portfolios of the Poor" shows that the microfinance strategy to alleviate poverty has limitations in its current incarnation, since the carefully amassed anecdotal evidence of the book shows that micro-loans are used for day-to-day living purposes rather than entrepreneurship.

The book puts forth new ways to think about poverty; broaden the scope of microfinance to deliver loans for general purposes; enable savings; add meaningful consumer protections; and ultimately create the next generation of banks for the "bottom billion." Through the ongoing work of Morduch and the Financial Access Initiative (www.financialaccess.org) a new, 21st century vision for microfinance may evolve, grounded upon a careful review of its notable successes, potentially expanded use (as in insurance), and limitations. Enlarging our understanding of the real lives of the poor is an important first step .

NYU's planners will be included among those under pressure to "get it right" as they prepare to open the first full degree-granting campus of a "Western-style" university in this traditionally conservative Middle Eastern culture come the fall of 2010.
 
The NYU Abu Dhabi campus and the future of the Emirate were among the topics discussed April 20, 2009 during a panel moderated by NYU Wagner Dean Ellen Schall that included Ballon; Mark Gordon, director of design for the NYU Office of Strategic Assessment; Jamie Greene, founding principal of ACP + Planning; John Livingston, president of Tishman Construction Corporation; and Jeffrey Raven, director of sustainable planning and urban design for the Louis Berger Group. The discussion was called "Spotlight on Abu Dhabi: Challenges and Opportunities in an Emerging Global City."
 
To start off, Schall described what is expected of the NYU Abu Dhabi campus, saying the inaugural class will contain up to 100 "of the best high school students from across the world." For the first year, she said, there are to be approximately 35 faculty members, creating a one-time, extraordinary student-to-faculty ratio of nearly 2-to-1.
 
For the first few years, the NYU Abu Dhabi will be housed at a downtown campus,  before moving to permanent buildings on Saadiyat Island (which means the Island of Happiness in Arabic).
 
Over time, she said, the enrollment is expected to climb to an estimated 2,000 to 4,000 students. Al Bloom, the outgoing president of Swarthmore College, is vice chancellor of NYU Abu Dhabi.
 
"This feels like among the most extraordinary moves that a higher education institution can take," Schalll said, adding it's "not without its risks and not without its complications."
 
Ballon said one of the single biggest challenges for the enterprise was ensuring that NYU maintain exceptionally high hiring standards, and not presume that any top-tier academic talent would be resistant to relocating.

The treatment of migrant workers in the United Arab Emirates was also discussed.

John Livingston, president of Tishman Construction Corp., whose company has been doing business in Abu Dhabi for the past year, said that many laborers in Abu Dhabi are from Pakistan and India, earn an average $150 a month, and are housed in what he described as work camps, where they pay for their food but are not charged rent.
 
"I'm told it's not terrific, it's not squalor but it's not terrific," said Livingston.

Ballon said the University will work with its partners in Abu Dhabi to provide the workers constructing the NYU Abu Dhabi campus with working and living standards that are among the highest in the region.

For years, nearby Dubai was immersed in an unprecedented building boom, such as its indoor ski resort, that lacked a cohesive plan. But the global recession and credit crunch coupled with a drastic drop in oil and natural gas prices and tourism have prohibited or stalled billions of dollars in construction projects there.
 
Jamie Greene, whose firm has been doing work in Abu Dhabi for the past 18 months, says that not only is Abu Dhabi much wealthier than Dubai, but unlike its neighbor Adu Dhabi has an integrated design program for its urban planning called "Estimada," which means "sustainability" in Arabic, as part of the overall "Plan of Abu Dhabi 2030" that ostensibly should prevent some of the planning problems currently besetting Dubai.
 
When the panel was asked to predict what Abu Dhabi might look like in the future, Greene offered that, if nothing else,  Abu Dhabi will have "one of the most impressive public transportation systems in the world" including water taxis and high speed rails. The biggest question mark on the area's potential for growth, Greene said, surrounds the ability to find a sufficient water supply.
 
Livingston said he was somewhat skeptical about whether importing culture will work but on the other hand, having all those great institutions in the same city is "pretty cool."
 
"I'm not sure it's going to be another Rome or New York or Shanghai but it might still be a great city," Livingston said.

Raven said that the "ambition of the place is just awesome, you got the Guggenheim, you got the Louvre." Dean Schall then gently reminded him, "you've got NYU." 
 
Mark Gordon was asked for his opinion. "Wouldn't it be exciting if it turned out to be the city that finally got it right?," he said.

NYU Wagner Dean Ellen Schall welcomed about 100 public service and business leaders and others to the Fifth Avenue Ballroom. The daylong conference also featured the author and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, NYU Wagner Professor Paul Light, an expert on the federal government, and Robert M. Shrum, the noted political strategist and a Wagner senior fellow.

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The conversations and audience questions focused on the President's unparalleled attempts  -- except for, perhaps, the first 100 days of Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency in the grips of the Great Depression -- to stabilize a reeling national economy. Commentary also dealt with Obama's evolving leadership style, the strong public support his actions and speeches have elicited, and the immediate and long-range challenges facing cash-squeezed cities and states.

"The most important thing that he has done," said Governor Corzine, referring to President Obama, "is he has restored respect and confidence in the office of the presidency."
Philadelphia's Mayor Nutter, fielding a question from Mark Whitaker, gave the new commander-in-chief a "B-plus/A-minus" -- ticking off a list of the President's accomplishments and the many initiatives in healthcare and alternative energy investment that may yet materialize -- and he added that the President and his administration have been strikingly accessible and sensitive to the concerns of big-city mayors such as himself.

 "They know where cities are," Nutter said.

At another point, Doris Kearns Goodwin, who appeared with Shrum, talked about ways in which Obama evokes Lincoln, with national crises setting the stage for both men, and with both of them attuned to the past for lessons about how to proceed.

"He really has this sense of history," she said of the new president, who appears willing to act boldly.

Noted Shrum, "The [president's first] budget is an architecture for a radically different future."

Goodwin said that much about Obama's style brings to mind her understanding and appreciation of America's commander in chief during the Civil War. Mentioning that Obama has spoken to her about Lincoln, she said jokingly that these days the last thing she thinks about when she goes to bed at night is Abraham Lincoln.

"If you are a planner, you have to learn implementation," said Burden, wearing a daffodil jacket. And her presentation -  entitled "Shaping the City: A Strategic Blueprint for New York City's Future" - focused on  how new land-use rules changed public life since she and Mayor Michael Bloomberg started revamping the city's zoning code in 2002. Burden brought the audience back to the trepidation-filled winter of that year, telling them that her boss had gathered his team to  inform them: "We are going to accomplish a great deal."

That meant, for starters, a new structure. "The way you change land use is to unite all agencies under one deputy mayor," Burden told the audience at Wagner. "City planning used to report to the Deputy Mayor for Culture and Schools. I wanted to be the think tank of the administration, but [then-Deputy Mayor for Economic Development and Rebuilding] Dan Doctoroff said no, you're the brains of the administration." And she said Doctoroff requested a PowerPoint summarizing the planning department's first two-year plan. "And we didn't know what a PowerPoint was," she added, in a mild bit of hamming.

She knows now. In her Wagner talk, Burden led the audience through a chain of planning principles that she said steered the dozens of rezonings that followed. They assert that New York must compete with global capitals by providing the glorious public spaces and mixed-use districts executives want. So it must refresh and protect its distinctive neighborhoods, which Burden said means on-the-ground investigation by all planning staff. "You don't lift a pencil for your zoning until you've walked the neighborhood," she said, later noting that she'd shorn community-board presentations of their jargon so that civic groups "can connect and produce a better document." 

Growth in a global city can't choke the air or ignore the rising seas -- and Burden noted that all her agency's recipes for new towers and housing "channeled growth to transit," even raising debt for a new subway stop on the Far West Side. She said the city's cherished neighborhoods must blend with "comprehensively planned" destinations, like Lower Manhattan, which planners should guide with a devotion to mass transit and a feel for "three-dimensional urban design."

Burden said she has guided her agency away from being "reactive to developers," and toward a visionary stance. That has played out in the rebirth of waterfronts in all five boroughs and a complete fealty to "excellent design, from iconic buildings to a bench in a park to materials on a building."

Burden skimmed from Ground Zero to Downtown Brooklyn to the perhaps still-obscure Long Island City ("I told a friend I was going there, and he said: will you be back by tonight?") to Jamaica, the South Bronx, Harlem (the site of the first-ever bonus floorplate allowances to developers who build arts centers in their towers) out to St. George, Staten Island's only transit hub. Everywhere, the presentation showed, planners sought to bulk up commercial arteries, allow housing where it would naturally grow, and invigorate public space.

The City Planning Commission's next forays, if Burden and her boss have another term, would spread across neighborhoods. Burden outlined a plan to encourage grocery stores in low-income neighborhoods by exempting supermarkets a building's maximum allowable size. Maps of neighborhoods with high diabetes and obesity overlap eerily well, she said, with ones of areas lacking grocery stores. She also cited efforts to facilitate sidewalk cafes, especially small ones that enliven an area's days and nights, and to increase bike commuting by obliging new buildings to provide bike parking.

Burden ended her talk with a look at Coney Island, a neighborhood that repels cookie-cutter zoning. "We need two things, quite different, both important," she said. "They are a year-round entertainment district that is open and accessible, and facilitated development of new housing, including affordable housing."

Burden demonstrated that her approach to planning fuses goals that seem distinct in a constantly changing city.