Good Economics for Hard Times

The experience of the last decade has not been kind to the image of economists: asleep at the wheel (perhaps with the foot on the gas pedal) in the run-up to the great recession, squabbling about how to get out of it, tone-deaf in discussions of the plight of Greece or the Euro area; they seem to have lost the ability to provide reliable guidance on the great problems of the day. In this ambitious, provocative book Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo show how traditional western-centric thinking has failed to explain what is happening to people in a newly globalized world: in short Good Economics has been done badly. They cover the most essential issues, including why migration doesn't follow the law of supply and demand, why trade liberalization can drive unemployment up and wages down and why nobody can really explain why and when growth happens. In doing so, they seek to reclaim this essential terrain, and to offer readers an economist's view of the most pressing political issues, one that is candid about the obstacles we face but optimistic that we can find better ways to overcome them.