India’s developmental arc has been described in myriad ways, but it takes two esteemed economists to call it “precocious”. It is an interesting label for India’s economic history since Independence. If used in the context of a child who shows achievement much earlier than usual, it can be seen in a positive light. That is not necessarily so when the word is used to describe things happening too early, such as puberty, for example. Plumbing through over 600 pages of the book, many of them filled with charts, it is clear that the authors, Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian, have...