Immigration and inequality, globalization and technological disruption, slowing growth and accelerating climate change—these are sources of great anxiety across the world, from New Delhi and Dakar to Paris and Washington, DC.
In the past, we’ve turned to economists to solve these large-scale problems, but over the past few decades—and certainly since the 2008 financial crisis—the global citizenry have lost their faith in economists. The resources to address these challenges are there, but what we lack are ideas that will help us jump the wall of disagreement and distrust that divides us.
In this revolutionary book, renowned MIT economists Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, the authors of the prize-winning Poor Economics (2011), take on this challenge, building on cutting-edge research in economics explained with lucidity and grace. Original, provocative, and urgent, Good Economics for Hard Times makes a persuasive case for intelligent forms of intervention, based on sound research into real-life situations; and a society built on compassion and respect. It shines a light to help us appreciate and understand our precariously balanced world
Abhijit Banerjee, winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics, 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). In 2011, he was named one of Foreign Policy magazine’s top 100 global thinkers. Banerjee served on the U.N. Secretary-General’s High-level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda.
Esther Duflo, winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics, 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).