Single stories

A student from my class on poverty sent me a link to this excellent TED talk by Chimamanda Adichie, a Nigerian novelist, on "The Danger of the Single Story". She rightly suggested that it reflects one of the key lessons I am trying to get across through my poverty classes. That lesson is that as policy makers we cannot afford to treat the poor as a single entity, as an Other. Our use of statistics encourages us to think of policy impacts as abstract losses and gains and tend to reduce problems to unidimensional causes rather than recognizing the complexity of each problem and the very real impact of poverty alleviation programs or macroeconomic stabilization packages on the presence of butter on our dinner table.