Excerpts: “The fact that poor people got hurt is what we would expect from the Stolper-Samuelson theorem: in rich countries it is the workers who suffer. What is surprising is how geographically concentrated the suffering ends up being. The left-behind people live in left-behind places” (p. 80).

“To the extent we are all benefitting from trade, we should collectively pay for the cost. It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steel workers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish” (p. 96).

“When a tree gets cut down in Nairobi, GDP counts the labor used and the wood produced, but does not deduct the shade and beauty that are lost. GDP values only those things priced and marketed” (p. 153).

“Given that, we will argue, it may be time to abandon our profession’s obsession with growth. The most important question we can usefully answer in rich countries is not how to make them grow even richer, but how to improve the quality of life of their average citizen” (p. 166).

“In a policy world that has mostly abandoned reason, if we do not intervene we risk becoming irrelevant, so let’s be clear. Tax cuts for the wealthy do not produce economic growth” (p. 177).

“What all of this tells us is that we cannot take it for granted that resources will flow to their best use. If they do not within a single family or within a town, we clearly should not expect them to do so across an entire country” (p. 191-192).

“We don’t know what will happen this time around, since we haven’t seen the very long run yet, but the impact of the current wave of automation (which started in 1990, giving us a perspective of more than twenty-five years) appears so far to be negative” (p. 231).

“A large part of the premiums paid to financial sector employees are almost surely pure rents; that is, rewards not for talent or hard work but for nothing more than having lucked out in landing that particular job” (p. 245).

“When everyone was on the same scale, CEOs had to grow salaries at the bottom to increase their own. With stock options, they had no reason to increase wages at the bottom, and in fact every reason to squeeze costs” (p. 246).

“The only recourse we have against bad ideas is to be vigilant, resist the seduction of the ‘obvious,’ be skeptical of promised miracles, question the evidence, be patient with complexity and honest about what we know and what we can know” (p. 326).

Banerjee, Abhijit V. and Duflo, Esther (2019). Good Economics for Hard Times. New York: Hachette Book Group.