Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury’s Reviews > Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems > Status Update

"Without that vigilance, conversations about multifaceted problems turn into slogans and caricatures and policy analysis gets replaced by quack remedies."

"Ideas are powerful. Ideas drive change. Good economics alone cannot save us. But without it, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of yesterday. Ignorance, intuitions, ideology, and inertia combine to give us answers that look plausible, promise much, and predictably betray us. As history, alas, demonstrates over and over, the ideas that carry the day in the end can be good or bad."

"Blind economics missed the explosion in inequality all over the world, the increasing social fragmentation that came with it, and the impending environmental disaster, delaying action, perhaps irrevocably."

"Blinkered economics told us trade is good for everyone, and faster growth is everywhere. It is just a matter of trying harder and, moreover, worth all the pain it might take."

"Bad economics underpinned the grand giveaways to the rich and the squeezing of welfare programs, sold the idea that the state is impotent and corrupt and the poor are lazy, and paved the way to the current stalemate of exploding inequality and angry inertia."

"Good economics prevailed over ignorance and ideology to ensure insecticide-treated bed nets were given away rather than sold in Africa, thereby cutting childhood malaria deaths by more than half."

"Policy is powerful. Governments have the power to do enormous good but also important damage, and so do large private and bilateral donors."

"And yet as development economists we are also keenly aware that the most remarkable fact about the last forty years is the pace of change, good and bad."

"The rich and the talented step nimbly into the glittering pockets of economic success, but all too many of the rest have to hang back. This is the world that produced Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Brexit and will produce many more disasters unless we do something about it."

"Businesses shut down in Boise and show up in booming Seattle, but the workers who lost their jobs cannot afford to move to Seattle. Nor do they want to anyway, since so much of what they value— their friends and their families, their memories and their loyalties— will have to stay behind."