This is no "Poor Economics"
3 stars
The best way to summarize this book is that it represents the median American economist consensus circa 2010. Rarely does the actual research of Duflo and Banerjee poke through - this book could have been written by nearly anyone with an economics degree, and demonstrates a shocking deference to long discredited physics based models of the economy. It's also laughably naive on a wide variety of topics - carbon taxes, the nature of and importance of racism, etc. Much of the book has aged terribly, especially given that the authors have fled the US, and the NYT-brain both sides-ism on display here is indefensible. If you're interested in how the average economist views the world it's a useful book, but you won't learn much.
The best way to summarize this book is that it represents the median American economist consensus circa 2010. Rarely does the actual research of Duflo and Banerjee poke through - this book could have been written by nearly anyone with an economics degree, and demonstrates a shocking deference to long discredited physics based models of the economy. It's also laughably naive on a wide variety of topics - carbon taxes, the nature of and importance of racism, etc. Much of the book has aged terribly, especially given that the authors have fled the US, and the NYT-brain both sides-ism on display here is indefensible. If you're interested in how the average economist views the world it's a useful book, but you won't learn much.