Interview: Poor Economics for Kids by Esther Duflo and Cheyenne Olivier
Nobel Prize winning economist Esther Duflo and illustrator Cheyenne Olivier talk about collaborating on their book,the challenges and joys of creating the stories in it, and talking to children about difficult topics
In 2011, Nobel Prize-winning economists Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, who are married to each other, published Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty. The book upended assumptions about the causes of poverty and showed how it can be alleviated by parsing through evidence from the ground and by applying the research method the duo used in development economics. Duflo has now made the work accessible to younger readers through the picture book Poor Economics for Kids, co-authored with the illustrator Cheyenne Olivier. In an interview over Zoom, the duo spoke about their book and more:
Poor Economics draws on years of your work and multiple research studies. How did you think of publishing it as a children’s book?
Esther Duflo: I had always wanted to publish a children’s book. Children’s literature is important because what you read as a child has a formative impact on your life. We need books on poverty for children because there aren’t many.
After we finished Poor Economics, we realised that readers were particularly sensitive to the stories of people in the book. It was a powerful way to communicate concepts that are harder to convey through studies or chunks of text. Each story makes a particular point. And with fiction, we could synthesise the lives of the many, many people we had met over the years into fictional characters.
Poor Economics for Kids is both fiction and non-fiction. It follows the codes of fiction and has a story with a beginning and an end. But everything that happens to the characters can happen to someone in real life.
Do you also talk about your work and topics such as poverty and inequality with your children? Did their responses play a role in shaping this book?
Chayenne Olivier: I don’t have children, but Esther’s children were involved in shaping this book. One of the reasons why Esther and I ended up working together is that I had lived with her for some time. In some sense, this is also how the book started. I learnt about Esther and Abhijit’s research much before thinking about doing a picture book together. And she also had the time to see my illustrations.
The stories and the way we treat the child characters are based on our interactions with children. And Esther’s children had a fair amount of ideas.
Esther Duflo: People always make fun of me — that I get interested in doing things around children the same age as mine. When my first child was born, I got interested in infant cognition. When she was about six, I started thinking about this book and when she was seven, we wrote it. She was involved in it and discussed it with us. Now that my kids are 10 and 12, I am interested in middle-school mathematics. What happens to my children is the broader context to a lot of my work.
In Abhijit Banerjee’s foreword to the book, he says that the stories’ characters live in a village that could be in India, Kenya, Vietnam, or elsewhere. Given that you didn’t want to pin down the geography, how was the process of visualising the book?
CO: This was one of Esther’s first requirements when she proposed this series. Her work happens in many nations around the world and she didn’t want the book to be linked to a particular country, ethnic group, or culture.
As an illustrator, that creates a huge challenge because you depend on visual references to depict backgrounds, characters, choose their skin colour, etc. So, I had to take a different path. My style, which is geometric and plays with lines, shapes, colours, and basic visual elements, allowed me to create the imaginary world in the series. Everything is built around a limited set of shapes and colours that I mix and match so that it becomes a coherent universe, but you can’t pin it down.
But I had to draw floors, houses, clothes, etc, so I still needed references. Esther pointed me to the website Dollar Street, which has photographic records of how people live around the world based on their income. I used this database to pick different visual aspects, such as the shape of a pot and patterns on the floor, and combined them.
Did you also take inspiration from artworks and other books while developing the visual style for this series?
CO: I’m very much influenced by artists’ books for children, especially Russian experiments of the 1920s. They are geometric, on the verge of abstraction. People tell me that my drawings sometimes echo art from a certain period in Bengal — those were also influenced by the communist aesthetic.
Esther, you mentioned that you had had the idea for the book for a long time and Cheyenne, you said you were living together. What was the process of collaboration on the book like?
ED: From the get-go, I envisioned this as a series of books. In English, it is published as one book with distinct stories. They revolve around topics from Poor Economics. While they follow the book’s structure, they can be read in any order.
I’ve had the stories — what happens in them, what the characters do — in my system for a long time. I started by conceptualising the narrative as pages of text. Cheyenne and I discussed the text and transformed it into a 32-page storyboard that depicts what happens in each frame. She also flagged issues with the stories, such as logical incoherences, too much happening, things that are too brief to make sense, etc. She then created images as per the storyboard. I would review these and provide feedback, such as this person cannot possibly be doing that or that doesn’t correspond to people’s lived experiences. Then, she made the final drawings. It was extraordinarily cooperative. We were often literally in the same room.
Eventually, our French editor, Céline Ottenwaelter, also joined this dance. She has extensive experience working with children and on children’s literature, and she contributed a lot.
So, it’s not as if I wrote the story, shipped it to Cheyenne to illustrate, and then packed it into a book. It was a thoroughly collaborative project!
CO: It was interesting because I realised I had many prejudices: visual and otherwise. Even though I had read Poor Economist, I inadvertently made mistakes because they added dramatic flair. I felt it would be more interesting if a kid had to travel for a long time to reach school rather than go to the nearest village. But in reality, that’s not the case anymore.
So, it was nice to have my ideas refined and get the opportunity to do things differently. Sometimes, you can jump straight to the point you want to make, but is that the most important thing in a story? At times, we have to focus on the aspects that make the characters appealing, such as, say, the relationship between a mother and a child.
When you have 32 pages to develop a story, you could make a point on each page, but you also need to give the reader a break and allow the characters to go about their daily life. There is an idea that poverty is a relentless series of dramatic events or heroic fights without joy. But that is not the case. So, there are pages in the book where children just play together because that’s what children do.
Developing a series was helpful in this regard. It allowed us to explore different parts of the village and see the characters evolve. The teacher is perhaps not a positive character initially. She’s angry and frightened in the first story, but helps the kids throughout the next story.
There are close to 50 characters, many of whom recur over the 10 tales. We fleshed them out in each story while maintaining continuity with earlier ones. This was important because in Indian languages and French, we published each story as a separate book, but we didn’t want kids to have to buy the whole series to be able to follow them.
What do you think is the right way of introducing children to concepts such as poverty, inequality, and environmental crises? It could lead to anxiety and a sense of doom, but it could also motivate actions to change the status quo. What has your experience been in this regard?
ED: That’s a good question for Cheyenne because she’s conducting academic research on how to represent poverty in children’s literature.
CO: I’ve been doing workshops with kids. They are drawn to characters as characters, not as poor characters. If they identify with a character, they can think about the issues the character might be facing.
In a workshop with migrant children, the story in the series about migration helped them talk about their journey to France. It was a good way to initiate a dialogue, though you don’t jump to the topic after one reading.
At festivals, I’ve seen that if we present a book as one on poverty or politics, parents might not want that. But the same book could also be about gender, environment, water, or agriculture, so we have to talk about it in a way that appeals to parents and kids and does not feel overwhelming.
Making a detour to talk about those issues is not a bad thing because it becomes much easier to finally land on them. Even though a child reading the story might not be poor, they can relate to the poor character in many other ways. So, looking at an issue from different angles works well.
ED: I think a danger with children’s literature — and literature in general — is stereotypes and caricature. Regarding poverty, there are often simplistic views and many people don’t even want to think about it. But that’s not how one should address any problem, let alone one that affects so many people. We are complex beings and deserve to be treated with dignity.
So, the contrast is not between doom and gloom and cheerful, but between caricature and human. Life has all kinds of moments — cheerful, scary, sad — and all are in the book. The book’s aesthetic is predominantly cheerful; that’s what attracted me to Cheyenne’s illustrations from the very beginning. They are full of life and life can be full of joy, or at least, that’s what I would like to convey.
CO: We tried to make the stories open-ended. We proposed a specific solution, but many things were left unresolved, so that permits multiple readings. Children can read into the stories and images — any aspect can catch their imagination and propel them into another world.
EO: The book should be readable for everyone, even though the presentation might be altered for different kinds of readers. I think we succeeded because three publishers have brought it out and each has different views about where and who they want to market it to. In France, it’s for young kids and their parents, so each story has an essay at the end for adults.
In India, Juggernaut has marketed the English version to tweens and teens, so it has essays for them. In Bangla, Hindi, Marathi, etc., they are meant to be fun books for young readers, so Pratham Books has published them separately in cheap volumes without the essays. They have sent it to libraries all over the country as part of their efforts to disseminate high-quality reading materials.
It’s encouraging that publishers, whose job is marketing books, think that the book is for everyone and hopefully, readers will think the same.
How have readers responded to the series so far? In India, it just came out, but in France, you published the stories from 2022 onwards.
EO: Many parents said they wouldn’t read Poor Economics because while it is for the lay reader, it still requires focus and perhaps some knowledge of economics. They enjoyed reading Poor Economics for Kids more and learned a lot from it.
We did a radio show in France where there were questions from children. We realised that they have many prejudices, which we hadn’t even thought about. For example, they thought the poor don’t have any clothes or are dirty. It was striking — a lot needs to be done to address these prejudices.
It was heartening, though, that children got attached to certain characters and kept going back to them. For me, a children’s book is successful if kids want to keep rereading it and talking about it.
One of the best responses was of a four-year-old kid who saw a poor person on the street and exclaimed to their parents, “That’s the witch from the Bibir story.” The “witch”, of course, is not actually a witch, but a positive character. The fact that a child in France thought of the character from the series on seeing a homeless person is remarkable. It meant the story left a lasting impression on them.
CO: People appreciated that the universe we created is funny, not gloomy. Many children’s picture books are set in gloomy urban environments. But when parents buy a book, they want it to leave a smile on their child’s face.
Were there any ideas you wanted to explore in the series, but did not include because you thought they were unsuitable for children?
ED: No topic was off-limits. In fact, the opposite happened — we included more topics, such as climate change. These were not prominent in Poor Economics because it was written about 15 years ago. So, in a sense, Poor Economics for Kids is more up-to-date than its predecessor. Of course, we didn’t include everything we covered in Poor Economics, but this was to ensure narrative coherence, not because they were unsuitable.
You have to treat readers as intelligent beings, regardless of their age, and take them seriously. You can talk about everything, even in a subtle manner — you just have to make the effort. Our series reflects that vision.
CO: We also have to consider what’s most apt for the story. In Poor Economics, there is an anecdote where parents beat children and their teacher. There are various ways we could have gone about this: do we show it or say it explicitly in the text? Should we say it in the text, but not in the image? Would these depictions deviate from what we ultimately want to say?
As per our narrative strategy, it might not be something we want to emphasise, and therefore, we don’t show it. It’s not self-censorship, but a question of what would be most efficient and strategic for the story.
What were the most challenging and joyful aspects of developing the story and writing the book?
ED: There were many joys — one was inventing the stories. The other was collaborating to embody the stories into this wonderful product. The narrative and illustrations gave my work a dimension I never dreamt it could have.
There were no huge challenges, but 10 stories is a lot of work and took a long time. I also had to restrain myself from adding everything so that the stories could be streamlined. Inventing stories proved surprisingly easy — I could have had many more.
CO: My background is in comics, so I never had to create such a large universe before. It took time and effort to build the characters, create different environments, and get the colours right so that the illustrations are vivid. I swam in this universe for the last four years, especially since my thesis is also on it.
Another challenge was getting the tone right since kids always want to read something more challenging than what they can actually read. There is something genuine about a child opening a book and liking it within seconds. You want to achieve that somehow. But I could only know if I succeeded after four years of working on it. That is a huge challenge, but also a pleasure when it finally happens.
Besides, before I met Esther, I wanted to link my illustrations to social and environmental issues, but I was unsure how to do so. My ideas were floating without a specific placeholder. This book gave me the perfect opportunity to do that.
Syed Saad Ahmed is a writer and communications professional.