Review: Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The authors bring up an interesting fact at the beginning. Economists have a bad rap. The public will confuse them with TV business evangelists, paid by corporations, and probably also with bankers themselves, while real economists aren't earning millions to tout a company stock, but analyzing data to look at trends, etc. According to them a good way to tell the difference is if the 'economist' tries to predict the future (real economists won't do so, since they know it's impossible). I think the economics profession would do well to hire some marketing specialists. After all, if economists do what they do for the public good, they should probably work on being recognized and taken seriously. 

The issue with reading lots of econ books is that you keep encountering the same "revolutionary experiments" and "studies" over and over again. This one has the obligatory trust/ultimatum game, various Kahnemann/Tversky findings, etc. I'm not saying they shouldn't have included them, since they are important points, but just that readers who are into economics will have seen these before. 

Actually, the section on past immigration, which I expected to be a repeat, had some points that were new to me. I had no idea Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were so against German immigrants, and thought they wouldn't integrate with the others. That was new to me (I've heard about other politicians from 100 years ago saying the same about Italian, Irish and Jewish immigrants. 

All in all, however, this book has some very interesting points. At times I thought they showed some bias politically (not with their anti-Trump talk, which was warranted), but there was also a lot of nuance and plenty of data to prove their points. 

Some other notes I took:

"Let's be clear: Tax cuts for the wealthy do NOT create greater wealth"

In the US, 33% of those born in the bottom quintile will stay there, while only 7% will make it to the top quintile. This is the lowest level in the OECD. 

In Europe, these numbers are 26% and 11% respectively. 

"Economics is too important to be left to economists"

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