Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Recommends Book Co-authored by NYU Wagner Professor Jonathan Morduch

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is currently recommending Portfolios of the Poor, a groundbreaking book co-authored by NYU Wagner Professor of Public Policy and Economics Jonathan Morduch, for reading and discussion by the Facebook community.

The influential book is the result of systematic research on how the global poor – billions of people around the world who live on less than $2 a day – manage their money. Zuckerberg’s book club, A Year in Books, selects works with big ideas that impact public policy, society and business. Portfolios of the Poor is his 17th pick.

Professor Morduch, managing director of the Financial Access Initiative, wrote the book with Daryl Collins of Bankable Frontier Associates, who received her Ph.D. in Public Policy Analysis at NYU Wagner, and researchers Stuart Rutherford and Orlanda Ruthven.

Published in 2009 by Princeton University Press, Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day is the first in-depth examination of how the world’s poorest households patch together financial lives.The book shows that they do so with surprising sophistication and complexity, refuting commonly held assumptions about the poor.

Over 250 families in Bangladesh, India, and South Africa participated in the study. Their financial diaries show that poor households are not living hand-to-mouth, but that most of them save and borrow with their future in mind, and maintain complex financial lives because they are poor, not in spite of it.