Poverty: targeting the "what" not the "whom".

• Position: YOUR LIFE

A sweeping review of poverty by a researcher who has spent the past decade studying more than 35,000 households on four continents says policymakers are focusing too much on new ideas for lifting people out of poverty instead of coming to terms with why billions of individuals became poor in the first place. "It almost seems as if we have taken it for granted that all poor people are born poor--which they are not," writes Anirudh Krishna, who spent the past decade conducting thousands of interviews in nearly 400 diverse communities around the world.

"A large proportion of currently poor people were not born to poverty; they have become poor within their lifetimes."

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Krishna's book, One Illness Away: Why People Become Poor and How They Escape Poverty, calls on government officials, economists, and others to pay more attention to the everyday lives and ordinary events that underlie poverty. Beyond country-level statistics and political headlines that grab attention, people in barrios and remote villages are confronting challenges whose solutions may not lie with economic growth alone. Poverty unfolds every day as individuals are overwhelmed by illness, debt, drought, and other pressures.

"No universal solvent exists that can 'fix' poverty," he indicates. "We need to learn more about accelerating growth, but we also need to learn more about macro-micro links and about grassroots-level opportunities and threats."

Concepts such as "poverty level" inadequately capture the...