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title = "Earless Cows"
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*First read in 2013. Brought to the bonfires in Mošorin, 2023, Berlin and Orléans in 2024.*

In 2019 Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo won the Nobel Prize in Economics. They had spent years researching the lives of the poorest people on the planet. They concluded that the fight against poverty often relies on mistaken assumptions and unrealistic expectations from measures devised in offices, which reduce the poor to mere cartoon characters. Instead, their art of survival can be very resourceful. In their book *Poor Economics*, they provide examples of how people find ways around the control mechanisms put into place to manage them. In India, micro-insurance was attempted based on microcredit principles, specifically insuring cows, without developing any control mechanism, resulting in a massive influx of claims. "After the first lot of policyholders universally claimed to have lost their cattle, they (insurance company) decided that in order to claim that an animal had died, the owner would need to show the ear of the dead cow. The result was a robust market in cows' ears: Any cow that died, insured or not, would have its ear cut off and the ear would then be sold to those who had insured a cow. That way they could claim the insurance and keep their cow." 
