Raghuram Rajan Book order

"A brief book by an eminent researcher and former central banker urging central bankers to exercise caution and prudence, and to consider that they may not have every answer, when facing economic problems"-- Provided by publisher

Where is India going today? Is it surging forward, having just overtaken the United Kingdom to become the fifth-largest economy in the world? Or is it flailing, unable to provide jobs for the millions joining the labour force? What should India do to secure a better future?

In The Third Pillar, Raghuram Rajan, offers up a magnificent big-picture framework for understanding how three key forces -- the economy, society, and the state -- interact, why things begin to break down, and how we can find our way back to a more secure and stable plane. The 'third pillar' of the title is society. Economists all too often understand their field as the relationship between the market and government, and leave social issues for other people. That's not just myopic, Rajan argues; it's dangerous. All economics is actually socioeconomics -- all markets are embedded in a web of human relations, values and norms. As he shows, throughout history, technological innovations have ripped the market out of old webs and led to violent backlashes, and to what we now call populism. Eventually, a new equilibrium is reached, but it can be ugly and messy, especially if done wrong. Right now, we're doing it wrong. As markets scale up, government scales up with it, concentrating economic and political power in flourishing central hubs and leaving the periphery to decompose, figuratively and even literally. Instead, Rajan offers a way to rethink the relationship between the market and civil society and argues for a return to strengthening and empowering local communities as an antidote to growing despair and unrest