Good Economics for Hard Times

Economists are more like plumbers; we solve problems with a combination of intuition grounded in science, some guesswork aided by experience, and a bunch of pure trial and error. This

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 re

Another big factor that contributes to the trust gap is that academic economists hardly ever take the time to explain the often complex reasoning behind their more nuanced conclusions.

Economics is too important to be left to economists.

irrevocably. As John Maynard Keynes, who transformed macroeconomic policy with his ideas, wrote: “Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a fe

have already been wreaking their own kind of havoc. As economic activity slowed down and jobs vanished as a result of the lockdown, the rich countries spent 20 percent of their GDP on fiscal stimulus to minimize economic distress. By contrast, the poorest economies spent just 2 percent.

exhibit A for one of the phenomena we talk about at length in this book but mostly attribute to other people: the difficulty of taking scientific information and warnings seriously, if they require us to rethink the assumptions that underlie our day-to-day lives.

Despite the last couple of decades of falling global poverty, the crystallographic image highlights just how easily things can fall apart for the world’s most disadvantaged. In the United States, the killing, in quick succession,

just as it was necessary to magnify the pathogen manyfold to understand its structure and be able to develop a vaccine for coronavirus, perhaps we needed to understand the shape of what we are facing to be able to deal with it.