Nobel thoughts

Good Economics for Hard Times has a much broader canvas and covers globally important public policy issues, such as trade, immigration, environment and, of course, economic growth

It is rare that authors of a book one is reading, with an interview scheduled with one of the co-authors, win the Nobel Prize. In that the sense, reading Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems and the following conversation with Abhijit Banerjee — edited excerpts of which were published in this newspaper on October 22 — was a unique experience for this writer. Mr Banerjee and Esther Duflo, along with Michael Kremer, were awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel this year “for their experimental approach to alleviating global