There were 2 reasons why I started reading "Good Economics for Hard Times". First - the obvious one - the authors (Dr Abhijit Banerjee & Dr Esther Duflo) have won the 2019 Nobel Prize for Economics with a piquing title "experimental approach to alleviating global poverty". The second reason was the more than usual brouhaha in the Indian News media about this economist couple (apparently at one point, Dr Banerjee had almost campaigned for an Indian Political party and also the fact that he is fairly vocal about his Indian heritage viz. wearing traditional Bengali attire for the ceremonies etc).
Despite being insightful with quite a few "aha, this is interesting!" moments, the book is a mixed bag of goodies and left me with a sense of looking at a half baked product.
The first half deals with very relevant and real problems, "Immigration", "Trade" & "Growth" - taking into detailed consideration the impact of Trump politics post-2016. This makes the first half a perfect balance of analytical commentary (backed by real data from experiments) coupled with presenting the crux of their thinking in an easy-to-understand-but-not-exactly-dumbed-down manner.
The second half, however derails and IMO just rambles on at an abstract level using economic concepts that would baffle someone with no formal economics background. At one point, I had to actually google stuff and had to go back and read a few pages multiple times. To their credit, the authors do have a 2 page "warning" where they come clean about the second half being more abstruse and theoretical. Maybe I should have listened to that warning and stopped.
Anyhoo, I do recommend the first few chapters of the book - especially the ones about Immigration, Trade & Growth. The online literature around such contentious topics is usually highly partisan, so its a welcome change to look at data-backed conclusions. For the rest of the book though, go/no-go based on your liking/comfort with abstract economic discussions.
