The aim is to encourage children to ask the right questions, while breaking down prejudices about poverty. Together with illustrator Cheyenne Olivier, the 2019 Nobel Prize-winning economist Esther Duflo is publishing a series of 10 children's books based on the themes addressed in her 2011 book Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, co-written with Abhijit V. Banerjee. The French-language versions came out on September 1, with the last five volumes focusing on the consequences of climate change for the poorest.

Esther Duflo: Books are essential for building up the young and the values we pass on to them. As a child, the books I read made me ask a lot of questions about the world and my responsibilities. Unfortunately, children's books on the subject are full of stereotypes.

Cheyenne Olivier: The work for my thesis, which looks at the illustration of poverty in children's books, indeed shows that there are often two pitfalls: miserablism or heroism. We've done our utmost to avoid falling into either.

E. D.: We avoid telling them that they are the superheroes who will be able to solve climate problems, while we adults are incapable of changing our behavior even a little. In the book Thumpa, the little girl who wants to save the trees sets in motion a chain of actions without which nothing would be possible – other children and adults get involved like her, then television comes to the village, then the international community intervenes thanks to carbon credits enabling the forest to be preserved – but she does not act alone. Adults reading the book can see at what point in the chain everything can go wrong.

E. D.: To measure them, it is worth recalling the progress made in recent decades. After the 1980s, during which the Washington Consensus [the economic principles that guided the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank at the time] imposed major budget balances on them, poor countries managed to regain control of their economic and social policies during the 1990s.

By following the Millennium Development Goals [adopted in 2000 by the United Nations], which are very varied in terms of the fight for education, health and women's rights, local governments have been able to tackle concrete problems effectively, mainly with their own resources.

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