Overview

Two prize-winning economists show how economics, when done right, can help us solve the thorniest social and political problems of our dayThe 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. This precise but accessible book covers many of the most essential issues of our day--including migration, unemployment, growth, free trade, political polarization, and welfare. Banerjee and Duflo will confound and clarify the presumptions of our times, such as: Why migration doesn't follow the law of supply and demandWhy trade liberalization can drive unemployment up and wages downWhy macroeconomists like to bend the data to fit the modelWhy nobody can really explain why and when growth happensWhy economists' assumption that people don't change their minds has made has made polarization worseWhy quite often it doesn't take a village, especially if the villagers aren't that niceIn doing so, they seek to reclaim this essential terrain, and to offer readers an economist's view of the great issues of the day--one that is candid about the complexities, the zones of ignorance, and the areas of genuine disagreement

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9781549128851

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If you read one policy book this year--heck, this decade--read this one. -- Cass R. Sunstein, Robert Walmsley University Professor, Harvard University

Author Information

Abhijit Banerjee is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). Esther Duflo is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). Duflo is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science, and has received numerous academic honors and prizes including the Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences (2015), the Infosys Prize (2014), the Dan David Prize (2013), a John Bates Clark Medal (2010), and a MacArthur Genius Grant Fellowship (2009). Duflo is a member of the President's Global Development Council and a Founding Editor of the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, and is currently the editor of the American Economic Review. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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