Good Economics for Hard Times Quotes

“What is dangerous is not making mistakes, but to be so enamored of one’s point of view that one does not let facts get in the way. To make progress, we have to constantly go back to the facts, acknowledge our errors, and move”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems

“So at the end of the day, although we will try to stitch together the best evidence for these theories, the result will be tentative. We have already seen that growth is hard to measure. It is even harder to know what drives it, and therefore to make policy to make it happen. Given that, we will argue, it may be time to abandon our profession’s obsession with growth.”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems

“Economics is too important to be left to economists.”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems

“no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark you only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well your neighbors running faster than you breath bloody in their throats the boy you went to school with who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory is holding a gun bigger than his body you only leave home when home won’t let you stay.7”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems

“Herd behavior generates informational cascades: the information on which the first people base their decision will have an outsized influence on what all the others believe.”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems

“Mi a közös az aszály sújtotta vidéken élő indiai gazda, a chicagói South Side fiatalja és az ötvenes éveiben járó munkanélkülivé vált, fehér férfi között? Az, hogy bár vannak problémáik, nem ők jelentik a problémát. Megérdemlik, hogy annak lássuk őket, akik; és ne az őket sújtó nehézségek határozzák meg a róluk kialakított képet.”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems

“The bottom line is that, much as in rich countries, we have no accepted recipe for how to make growth happen in poor countries. Even the experts seem to have accepted this. In 2006, the World Bank asked the Nobel laureate Michael Spence to lead the Commission on Growth and Development (informally known as the Growth Commission). Spence initially refused, but convinced by the enthusiasm of his would-be fellow panelists, a highly distinguished group that included Robert Solow, he finally agreed. But their report ultimately recognized that there are no general principles, and no two growth episodes seem alike. Bill Easterly, not very charitably perhaps, but quite accurately, described their conclusion: “After two years of work by the commission of 21 world leaders and experts, an 11-member working group, 300 academic experts, 12 workshops, 13 consultations, and a budget of $4m, the experts’ answer to the question of how to attain high growth was roughly: we do not know, but trust experts to figure it out.”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee , Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems

“And, perhaps most urgently, how can society help all those people the markets have left behind?”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems

“In one large US university, where roommates were assigned at random, a study found that white students who happened to end up with African American roommates were significantly more likely to endorse affirmative action, and that white students assigned roommates from any minority group were more likely to continue to interact socially with members of other ethnic groups after their first year, when they had full freedom in choosing whom to associate with.”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems

“Statistical discrimination explains why the police in the United States justify stopping black drivers more often. And how the Hindu majoritarian government of the state of Uttar Pradesh recently explained why so many of the people “accidentally” killed by the state police (in what are called “encounter deaths”) are Muslim. There are more blacks and Muslims among criminals. In other words, what looks like naked racism does not have to be that; it can be the result of targeting some characteristic (drug dealing, criminality) that happens to be correlated with race or religion. So statistical discrimination, rather than old-fashioned prejudice—what economists call taste-based discrimination—may be the cause. The end result is the same if you are black or Muslim, though. A recent study on the impact of “ban the box” (BTB) policies on the rate of unemployment of young black men provides a compelling demonstration of statistical discrimination. BTB policies restrict employers from using application forms where there is a box that needs to be checked if you have a criminal conviction. Twenty-three states have adopted these policies in the hope of raising employment among young black men, who are much more likely to have a conviction than others and whose unemployment rate is double the national average.31 To test the effect of these policies, two researchers sent fifteen thousand fictitious online job applications to employers in New Jersey and New York City, just before and right after the states of New York and New Jersey implemented the BTB policy.32 They manipulated the perception of race by using typically white or typically African American first names on the résumés. Whenever a job posting required indicating whether or not the applicant had a prior felony conviction, they also randomized whether he or she had one. They found, as many others before them, clear discrimination against blacks in general: white “applicants” received about 23 percent more callbacks than black applicants with the same résumé. Unsurprisingly, among employers who asked about criminal convictions before the ban, there was a very large effect of having a felony conviction: applicants without a felony conviction were 62 percent more likely to be called back than those with a conviction but an otherwise identical résumé, an effect similar for whites and blacks. The most surprising finding, however, was that the BTB policy substantially increased racial disparities in callbacks. White applicants to BTB-affected employers received 7 percent more callbacks than similar black applicants before BTB. After BTB, this gap grew to 43 percent. The reason was that without the actual information about convictions, the employers assumed all black applicants were more likely to have a conviction. In other words, the BTB policy led employers to rely on race to predict criminality, which is of course statistical discrimination.”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems

“research in education shows that children quickly internalize their place in the pecking order, and teachers reinforce it. Teachers told that some children are smarter than others (even though they were simply chosen randomly) treat them differently, so that these children in fact do better.”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems

“The government exists in part to solve problems no other institution can realistically tackle. To demonstrate waste in government, one needs to show there is an alternative way of organizing the same activity that works better.”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems

“Most people believed, correctly, that most normal North Africans tended to be relatively poor and therefore unlikely to be able to afford a new car, and on the basis of that statistical association their presumption was that the individual North African driver of a nice car was a criminal. Now they assume he is an Uber driver, which is clear progress.”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems

“The answers to these problems take more than a tweet. So there is an urge to just avoid them. And partly as a result, nations are doing very little to solve the most pressing challenges of our time; they continue to feed the anger and the distrust that polarize us, which makes us even more incapable of talking, thinking together, doing something about them. It often feels like a vicious cycle.”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems

“A közgazdaságtan túlságosan fontos ahhoz, hogy csak a közgazdászokra bízzuk.”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems

“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. Without that vigilance, conversations about multifaceted problems turn into slogans and caricatures and policy analysis gets replaced by quack remedies. The call to action is not just for academic economists—it is for all of us who want a better, saner, more humane world. Economics is too important to be left to economists.”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems

“Additionally, there is good evidence that people particularly hate mistakes of their own making. The world is fraught with uncertainties, many of which people have no control over. These vagaries make them unhappy, but perhaps not as unhappy as making an active choice that ends up, purely as a result of bad luck, making them worse off than if they had done nothing.”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems

“Only a social policy founded on respect for the dignity of the individual can help make the average citizen more open to ideas of toleration.”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems

“there are no iron laws of economics keeping us from building a more humane world,”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems

“Women retained more information from the training, and those who were trained by them and listened to them did in fact learn more. But most farmers did not listen. They assumed women were less able, and therefore paid less attention to them. Along the same lines, when women in Bangladesh were trained to become line managers, they were just as good as men based on an objective assessment of their leadership and technical qualities, but they were perceived as less good by their line workers. And, presumably as a result, the performance of their lines also suffered, perversely confirming the prejudice that they were worse managers.39 What started as an unjustified preference against women resulted in women actually doing worse through no fault of their own, and this reinforced their inferior status.”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems

“Capital-scarce economies grow faster because new investment is highly productive. Rich economies, which are, in general, capital abundant, tend to grow more slowly because new investment is not as productive.”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems

“A better conversation must start by acknowledging the deep human desire for dignity and human contact, and to treat it not as a distraction, but as a better way to understand each other, and to set ourselves free from what appear to be intractable oppositions. Restoring human dignity to its central place, we argue in this book, sets off a profound rethinking of economic priorities and the ways in which societies care for their members, particularly when they are in need.”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems

“The call to action is not just for academic economists—it is for all of us who want a better, saner, more humane world. Economics is too important to be left to economists.”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems

“The increasing sophistication of robots and the progress of artificial intelligence has generated considerable anxiety about what would happen to our societies if only a few people had interesting jobs and everyone else had either no work or had a horrible job, and inequality ballooned as a result. Especially if this happened because of forces largely out of their control. Tech moguls are getting desperate to find ideas to solve the problems their technologies might cause. But we don’t need to contemplate the future in order to get a sense of what happens when economic growth leaves behind the majority of a country’s citizens. This has already happened—in the United States since 1980.”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems

“It is both patronizing and wrong-headed, in our view, to assume people must have screwed up just because we might have behaved differently. And yet society routinely overrules people’s choices, especially if they are poor, supposedly for their own good,”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems

“For that, we need to understand what undermines trust in economists. A part of the answer is that there is plenty of bad economics around. Those who represent the “economists” in the public discourse are not usually the same people who are part of the IGM Booth panel.”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems

“For the world of policy makers, this perspective suggests that a clear focus on the well-being of the poorest offers the possibility of transforming millions of lives much more profoundly than we could by finding the recipe to increase growth from 2 percent to 2.3 percent in the rich countries. In the coming chapters, we will go one step further and argue that it may even be better for the world if we did not find that recipe.”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems

“The mantra that government is corrupt and incompetent has produced the kind of jaded citizenry who can react to news of shameless corruption among its elected leaders with a shrug, from Washington, DC, to Jerusalem and Moscow. They basically have learned to expect nothing else, and stop paying attention.”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems

“In the United States, there is clearly an ideology of self-reliance, even though for many years it has been based, to a significant extent, on a fantasy—the states in the US where people take the most pride in their autonomy are also the ones most dependent on federal subsidies (Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Montana top the list by federal aid as fraction of revenue)”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems

“More generally, in a world of skyrocketing inequalities and “winner take all,” the lives of the poor and the rich are diverging wildly and will become irremediably different if we allow markets to drive all social outcomes”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems