I'm about halfway through Banerjee and Duflo's Good Economics for Hard Times, and thought I'd reflect on the quite stark difference in the way they think about migration versus trade 1/21 
A first point is to note that the book is written in a very easy to read format, and weaves together large amounts of the literature into a nice coherent viewpoint (each chapter has ~90 references!). The target reader is largely a rich country citizen worried about the world 2/21
The second chapter is on migration. Their basic message is the basic model of migration increases labor supply and depresses native wages is wrong, and that we shouldn't worry about too much migration, but rather too little 3/21
Their evidence is 1) gains to migration are really large, even for those who don't want to move; yet 2) there are lots of reasons why people don't want to move (risk, social ties, attractions of home), so most don't move; and 3) most evidence show small wage impact on natives 4/n
They conclude the main area for policy action is streamlining the migration process, and especially policies to ease the integration of migrants (without discussing evidence on whether these work) 5/n
In contrast, on trade, they start by describing comparative advantage and a strong view from economists that is pro-trade. But then they spend most of the chapter saying why we need to be more concerned about negative effects of trade 6/n
They focus especially on distributional impacts, arguing that the same factors that make people immobile (discussed above for migration), make it hard to adjust to trade shocks; and that trade has increased inequality in both poor and rich countries 7/n
There is a strong claim that Petia Topalova's finding that Indian districts involved in trade reduced poverty more slowly had a "brutal" reaction from the profession, leading her to be "blackballed by the academic elite" & paper to be rejected because of result, not methods 8/n
They discuss the China shock evidence on how trade hurt U.S. workers, then argue that trade is really not that important to the U.S. consumer anyway (that autarky would only lower GDP by 2.5%), and that internal integration is the bigger issue in India/China 9/n
Their policy prescriptions are then for more to be spent on targeted assistance to workers in industries that lost out to trade, as well as potentially subsidize firms hurt by trade so long as they keep employing older workers 10/n
They conclude the failing of the profession was thinking affected workers would be able to move jobs or places or both, and that we need to focus more on the pain that comes from this need to change 11/n
Both chapters rely heavily on a lot of evidence from recent literature, and so this discord between immigration and trade as to whether we should treat people's concerns about as mistakes or valid concerns the literature has overlooked is based on the relative literatures 12/n
So what would I have liked to see more discussion of? On migration, it would have been useful to discuss i) that immigration can also bring benefits to natives through increasing the variety of products link.springer.com/article/10.100…, 13/n
ii) discussion of how concerns about whether we face a deluge of migrants depends on demographic pressures, so will be different in the U.S. with aging Mexican and Central American populations, vs in Europe with a young African population onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.111… 14/n
iii) @m_clem & Lant Pritchett's work on whether migrants transmitting bad norms is a concern cgdev.org/sites/default/…; iv) more serious discussion of whether the very immobility they talk about means the need to help certain school systems/places adjust to migrant inflows 15/n
and most importantly, to look beyond the U.S./India a lot more and discuss the extent to which these same arguments that the problem is too little immigration apply to small countries. 16/n
There is no discussion of important debates like how migration policy itself should reform (e.g. should we put more focus on work visas or family reunification, should it be a points system vs employer-sponsored etc.). Also no discussion of which enforcement policies work 17/n
I know the trade literature much less, but the chapter seems a bit imbalanced in terms of how much it focuses on costs/the pain of trade versus the gain. The analysis is a bit static - e.g. it is not clear the dynamic effects of autarky will be as small as only 2.5% of GDP 18/n
And again on the trade chapter, would be good to discuss how much the discussion would be different if you are Belgium/New Zealand/Norway (or a small developing country) where trade is much more important 19/n
This is all to say that the chapters are thought-provoking, engaging, and well-argued - as they note in the intro, "you may well come to a different conclusion than we do" and this is the start of a conversation 20/21
Finally, impressive to see how quickly the publishers were able to update the U.S. cover to reflect the Nobel prize, although the inside text still refers to Elinor Ostrom as the only female econ Nobel prize winner so far. 21/21
