Over the next few days, our bloggers will be discussing "Poor Economics", a new book by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo about their work in experimental economics. You can read the first two posts here and here.

TO CUT to the chase: this is the best book about the lives of the poor that I have read for a very, very long time. The research is wide-ranging. Much of it is new. Above all, Banerjee and Duflo take the poorest billion people as they find them. There is no wishful thinking. The attitude is straightforward and honest, occasionally painfully so. And some of the conclusions are surprising, even disconcerting.

My colleagues have concentrated on the economics of this book. This approach is more than reasonable since the name of the discipline is in its title. However, that is not the only way of looking at the book and I want to concentrate on what might be called its politics or sociology: the descriptions of the lives of those who live on less than a dollar a day and what can be learned from them.

One feature, in particular, stands out. The life of the rural poor is extremely boring, with repetitive back-breaking tasks interrupted by periods of enforced idleness; it is far removed from Marie-Antoinettish idylls of Arcadia. As the authors remark, villages do not have movie theatres, concert halls, places to sit and watch interesting strangers go by and frequently not even a lot of work. This may sound rather demeaning to the poor, like Marx's comment about “the idiocy of rural life”.

But it is important to understand because, as the authors remark, “things that make life less boring are a priority for the poor”. They tell the story of meeting a Moroccan farmer, Oucha Mbarbk. They ask him what would he do if he had a bit more money. Buy some more food, came the reply. What would he do if he had even more money? Buy better, tastier food. “We were starting to feel very bad for him and his family when we noticed a television, a parabolic antenna and a DVD player.” Why had he bought all this if he didn't have enough money for food? “He laughed and said ‘Oh, but television is more important than food.'”

Nutritionists and aid donors often forget this. To them, it is hard to imagine anything being more important than food. And the poorer you are, surely, the more important food must be. So if people do not have enough, it cannot be because they have chosen to spend the little they have on something else, such as a television, a party, or a wedding. Rather it must be because they have nothing and need help. Yet well-intentioned programmes often break down on the indifference of the beneficiaries. People don't eat the nutritious foods they are offered, or take their vitamin supplements. They stick with what makes life more bearable, even if it is sweet tea and DVDs.

This does not mean outsiders cannot improve the diet of the poor (still less does it mean not intervening during a famine). But as Banerjee and Duflo remark “governments and international institutions need to completely rethink food policy”. Less cheap grain, more fortified and biofortified foods. More broadly, it teaches a vital lesson about the poor, one too often ignored: however little money they may have, the poor have preferences and their preferences deserve the attention they get in this book, and all too rarely elsewhere.