This book is written by a husband and wife team who just won the Nobel Prize in Economics.The book is well written and researched. In fact, it is surprisingly easy to read and understand for a lay person. The authors take a global approach to the subject. What impressed me was the fact they actually did research and analyzed data to find out what worked or not. They examined the most crucial issues the world faces such as migration, trade wars, inequality and climate change. They said “the book’...

This book has a huge amount of good economics. It surveys a wide range of areas: labor, tax, growth, politics, immigration, trade, and generally provides up-to-date discussions of some of the latest literature. The discussions of development--particularly India--are subtle, nuanced and thought provoking. A lot of the evidence is in the form of randomized control trials (RCTs), Abhijit Baanerjee and Esther Duflo are as committed to the method and process as they are to any particular conclusions....

Good Economics for Hard Times? More like Bad Dogmas for a Boring Read. This book is more of a political pamphlet than a serious economic analysis of the important issues. The authors are both radical left-wingers (they don't even try to hide it, to their credit), whose answer to every problem in the world is "more government would fix it".The book is full of sexism, racism and anti-science comments. In both the preface and chapters 2, 3 and 4 they describe Trump supporters as ignorant racists t

It's one of those interesting twists of fate that Banerjee and Duflo won the Nobel Prize in economics (together with Michael Kremer) a few days after having published their second book targeting a non-specialist audience. Professors Banerjee, Duflo and Kremer won their prize “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty”. In short, defying the idea that economics is not suited for the experimental approach, they set up randomized controlled trials (such as is the golden standard...

Much like their previous book, Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, Good Economics for Hard Times is a fluently structured and eloquently written piece of popular economics. It synthesizes a wide reading of the theoretical and empirical literature. It is full of insights, wide in scope, and moderate in tone. Its policy conclusions straddle the line between economic elitism and populism. On the one hand, the authors respect economic expertise enough to follow i...

I'm not sure why I had such a hard time finishing this one. It wasn't bad and I think it talked about a lot of good thing, things I agree with but I just had so much trouble wanting to read it. I do think it highlighted a lot of issues I personally have with the way economists talk or beliefs they hold which was great. I also liked knowing more about policy in other countries outside of the US. I think I've just heard or read a lot of similar things before so that's why I felt less into it. I wo...

Economics is too important to be left to economists. After listening to a series of lectures on introductory economics, I was struck by the degree to which the basic logic of supply and demand was used to make sweeping pronouncements about human behavior and economic policy. The lecturer, starting from the premise that supply and demand is inexorable, would rule out certain policies as working against the market, while promoting those he considered ‘market-friendly.’ But rarely did he stop to

Aristotle warned us against expecting more precision from a subject than it allows. As Aristotle wrote, “for it is the mark of an educated mind to seek only so much exactness in each type of inquiry as may be allowed by the nature of the subject-matter.”The idea that economics commands the same level of precision as physics has led to the perpetuation of several misconceptions and dogmas. That the authors fully understand this is a testament to the book. The authors are not dogmatic, nor are the...

I totally enjoyed Banerjee’s Poor Economics, and it was no surprise he was honored with the Nobel price in economics. Here he shared good economics answers for tough questions. 1. Migration. Evidence: migrants do not lower the wages of the poor, because they are also consumers thus increasing both the supply and demand for work. Solution: we should encourage migration. 2. Trade: Evidence: gains from international trade is only 2.5% GDP for big and self sufficient countries like America, but matt...

I learned some interesting factual tidbits from this book, which succeeded best at gathering research findings (especially RCTs, the forte of the authors) in one place. However, I ultimately didn't find a lot of the authors' broader conclusions particularly compelling. And, in many places, I think the authors glossed over nuance too quickly/too unthinkingly liberally.I agreed with the authors' opening chapter, which makes the point that policy/economics matters and that paying attention to resea...

Esther and Abhijit are couples. They are also the 2019 winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics. In their previous book, Poor Economics, the duo set new outlines for fighting global poverty and help developing countries improve everything from school enrollment to immunisation rates. This current book examines the current global challenges with a broad analysis of available economic research. The authors methodically proffered humane and unambiguous solutions to these crucial problems humanity pr...

The authors are a husband and wife team who won the Nobel Prize in Economics “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.”“Herd behavior generates informational cascades: the information on which the first people base their decision will have an outsized influence on what all the others believe.”

This wasn’t the book I was afraid it was going to be. I’ve read a few books of economics – called things like ‘Filthy Lucre: Economics for People Who Hate Capitalism’, that end up being books of standard economic theory that essentially end up saying, ‘suck it up, princess, Capitalism is the best!’Early in this book they quote a mathematician/physicist who challenges Paul Samuelson to “name me one proposition in all of the social sciences which is both true and non-trivial.” Samuelson provides t...

First I need to get this out of my system: incredibly funny to me that it’s taken us this long before the Nobel prize winners for economics of the year were two mfers who simply asked “what if we tried being nice to the poor?” This book is intriguing in its writing, it gets props on that for sure. It’s fun to read and interesting despite what its ideas might contain. As for the economics, there’s a lot of Keynesian revivalism because two ding dong economists finally figured out that 40 years of

Excellent overview of new ways economists are looking at global problems and challenging some problem myths. Also, they won the nobel prize so you should read their book

some key takeaways:1)influx of immigration is more likely to depress opportunities for high-skilled native workers than low-skilled native workers2)low-skilled immigration doesn't drive down low-skilled wages because they produce accompanying effect of increase in demand in low-skilled labor (because they also buy stuff and spend money in their new host country)3) free trade is good, but only if beneficiaries of comparative advantage within society (usually those possessing capital in rich count...

Confirming to me that economics is an entirely uncertain science.I definitely enjoyed this but have a lot of reservations about the certainty of literally anything that was said in these pages. This is a book unabashedly written by two economists with a liberal view about how to improve wealth gap and poverty. The is a very subjective analysis of the reasons behind declining economic systems and the poverty that they perpetrate. I don't necessarily disagree with anything said, but as someone who...

Bad economics, political screedThis book is a really bad attempt to cloak a political hack job and pretend it has some economic basis. The economics is largely anecdotal and only seems to support their conclusions if you hold their political point of view. Their underlying mission seems to be to prove that Trump and Republicans are bad. If that wasn’t their point, they could have written the whole book without taking a shot at Republicans (deplorables) in each and every chapter. Still, their con...

While I enjoy reading non-fiction, I tend towards less academic topics - or rather, anything that does not remind me of my undergraduate studies. However, the praises about this book and how it addresses economics in a more enlightened and less conventional or traditional approach intrigued me. Were those praises well-founded? I would definitely say so there were some truly fascinating insights to be gleaned from this book. Stuff that I did not learn in university during my Economics lectures. T...

"Economics is too important to be left to economists.""We, the economists, are often too wrapped up in our models and our methods and sometimes forget where science ends and ideology begins."What stood out for me in this remarkable book is Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo's humility. The book focuses on policy debates and topics that receive enormous media attention- immigration, trade and tariffs, inequality, taxation, etc. But the way it does is by building enough historical context, explaini...