An Economist's Brain Dump
4 stars
This a thought-provoking but surprisingly shallow brain dump of a book that uses economic models to probe what causes economic inequality. If you're looking for data, though, look elsewhere - this is all about models. I'll be honest, economic models are some of the least convincing research methodologies for me since they are trivially easy to fit when you use data and amount to mathematical camouflage for relatively straightforward hypotheses. But ultimately they are only hypotheses, so tell you almost nothing about the phenomenon you care about. On top of that, the book is poorly edited, most likely because the early chapters are copied from Stiglitz's other writings. This leads to many identical sections in different chapters. Overall, this book is probably useful as a good reference book for theories on inequality, but you probably shouldn't read it all the way through
This a thought-provoking but surprisingly shallow brain dump of a book that uses economic models to probe what causes economic inequality. If you're looking for data, though, look elsewhere - this is all about models. I'll be honest, economic models are some of the least convincing research methodologies for me since they are trivially easy to fit when you use data and amount to mathematical camouflage for relatively straightforward hypotheses. But ultimately they are only hypotheses, so tell you almost nothing about the phenomenon you care about. On top of that, the book is poorly edited, most likely because the early chapters are copied from Stiglitz's other writings. This leads to many identical sections in different chapters. Overall, this book is probably useful as a good reference book for theories on inequality, but you probably shouldn't read it all the way through