Beyond the Community: On the Book “Good Economics for Hard Times” by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo

Abstract

The review is devoted to the book by 2019 Nobel laureates in Economics Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, published in Russian by the Gaidar Institute Publishing House in 2021. Building upon the crisis of confidence in economists, the authors in the microeconomic plane reflect upon a set of effective tools for combating poverty in economic science. The book focuses on the following topics: trust, migration, trade, economic growth, technological progress, the role of the state in the economy, and basic income. Duflo and Banerjee consider real situations within the framework of these topics, using the method of natural experiments, in order to show the inconsistency and lack of fundamental basis in numerous stereotypes of economic policy. Technological progress is useful for high-tech industries in terms of creating jobs and saving public funds, but for the rest of the labor market it may destroy jobs and lead to increasing social insecurity of citizens with low incomes. It is the consideration of the program theses of economic science on trust, migration, trade, technological progress and welfare from the perspective of socially vulnerable population segments that determines the uniqueness of the study. Since the work touches on disparate areas, it also has a number of drawbacks, which are mentioned in the review. In particular, the idea of a natural experiment is not followed by a political economy generalization, which is a disadvantage of the work.