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Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 58 ratings

For decades, Democratic politicians have frustrated progressives by tinkering around the margins of policy while shying away from truly ambitious change. What happened to bold political vision on the left, and what shrunk the very horizons of possibility? In Thinking like an Economist, Elizabeth Popp Berman tells the story of how a distinctive way of thinking - an "economic style of reasoning" - became dominant in Washington between the 1960s and the 1980s and how it continues to dramatically narrow debates over public policy today.

Introduced by liberal technocrats who hoped to improve government, this way of thinking was grounded in economics. At its core was an economic understanding of efficiency, and its advocates often found themselves allied with Republicans and in conflict with liberal Democrats who argued for rights, equality, and limits on corporate power. By the Carter administration, economic reasoning had spread throughout government policy and laws affecting poverty, healthcare, antitrust, transportation, and the environment.

Thinking like an Economist offers critical lessons for the future. With the political left resurgent today, Democrats seem poised to break with the past - but doing so will require abandoning the shibboleth of economic efficiency and successfully advocating new ways of thinking about policy.

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Product details

Listening Length 12 hours and 3 minutes
Author Elizabeth Popp Berman
Narrator Suzie Althens
Whispersync for Voice Ready
Audible.com Release Date April 05, 2022
Publisher HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
Program Type Audiobook
Version Unabridged
Language English
ASIN B09RQZ64SJ
Best Sellers Rank #146,699 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals)
#139 in Economic Public Policy
#479 in Economic Policy
#600 in Economic Policy & Development (Books)

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4.2 out of 5 stars
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Amazing use of & grasp of history
5 out of 5 stars
Amazing use of & grasp of history
I like Elizabeth Popp Berman’s “Thinking Like an Economist.” It is a good book.I say that because her book made me change a structural paradigm I have in my head. Prior to reading this text, I had in my mind that everything went wrong when the business right took the Powell Memo, the libertarian right took Goldwaterism, and the religious right rose post Roe and it was all thrown into a mixer during the Reagan revolution. You can all sorts of well-being charts that dog-leg sometime between 1973 and 1981 or so.Elizabeth Popp Berman’s introduces the idea that part of the change has to be seen as the takeover of economic reasoning of a cost-benefit or structuralist model into how policy was set over an idea of doing the right thing because they were the right thing based on “commitments to universality, rights, and equality” (99). Basically, it is the triumph of the consequentialists over the deontologists. She does note the basic issues where my priors lay, noting that there was a lot of political issues entangled in the rise of the right as you can’t separate the economic from the political (140).The thing that really makes the book stand out is her use of and grasp of history – and that she shows that the institutionalization of the economic shift to efficiency wasn’t just dominated by one party. Embracing this move was a bipartisan approach from Kennedy though Clinton and beyond. If there’s a weakness to the text it is that she drops most of the history after Reagan, but we live in the world of the shift she outlines so including the new Democrats in depth might be beating too much of a dead horse. The bipartisan embrace means that this move is also internalized to the point where you don’t have to make the argument for efficiency anymore, but instead if you desire broad based policy you have to argue from that point and anticipate these sorts of objections about how you are going to pay for that if you want to do something because it needs to be done. The present gets little notice but there is mention of the Neo-Brandeisians (though exemplars like Tim Wu and Lina Khan aren’t mentioned by name) and an acknowledgement that there is a whole realm of policy argument to the left of the economic efficiency argument and that there is a possibility, at least in antitrust, that there is more than a very narrow understanding of what consumer welfare means under the Sherman Act.Ultimately though, for me it circles back to the many-headed policy demon that was already in my priors. Instead of completely reframing the challenge, it is a drawing of a different sort of structural barrier to any real positive change for a broad base of people.
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Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on April 11, 2022
    I like Elizabeth Popp Berman’s “Thinking Like an Economist.” It is a good book.

    I say that because her book made me change a structural paradigm I have in my head. Prior to reading this text, I had in my mind that everything went wrong when the business right took the Powell Memo, the libertarian right took Goldwaterism, and the religious right rose post Roe and it was all thrown into a mixer during the Reagan revolution. You can all sorts of well-being charts that dog-leg sometime between 1973 and 1981 or so.

    Elizabeth Popp Berman’s introduces the idea that part of the change has to be seen as the takeover of economic reasoning of a cost-benefit or structuralist model into how policy was set over an idea of doing the right thing because they were the right thing based on “commitments to universality, rights, and equality” (99). Basically, it is the triumph of the consequentialists over the deontologists. She does note the basic issues where my priors lay, noting that there was a lot of political issues entangled in the rise of the right as you can’t separate the economic from the political (140).

    The thing that really makes the book stand out is her use of and grasp of history – and that she shows that the institutionalization of the economic shift to efficiency wasn’t just dominated by one party. Embracing this move was a bipartisan approach from Kennedy though Clinton and beyond. If there’s a weakness to the text it is that she drops most of the history after Reagan, but we live in the world of the shift she outlines so including the new Democrats in depth might be beating too much of a dead horse. The bipartisan embrace means that this move is also internalized to the point where you don’t have to make the argument for efficiency anymore, but instead if you desire broad based policy you have to argue from that point and anticipate these sorts of objections about how you are going to pay for that if you want to do something because it needs to be done. The present gets little notice but there is mention of the Neo-Brandeisians (though exemplars like Tim Wu and Lina Khan aren’t mentioned by name) and an acknowledgement that there is a whole realm of policy argument to the left of the economic efficiency argument and that there is a possibility, at least in antitrust, that there is more than a very narrow understanding of what consumer welfare means under the Sherman Act.

    Ultimately though, for me it circles back to the many-headed policy demon that was already in my priors. Instead of completely reframing the challenge, it is a drawing of a different sort of structural barrier to any real positive change for a broad base of people.
    Customer image
    5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing use of & grasp of history
    Reviewed in the United States on April 11, 2022
    I like Elizabeth Popp Berman’s “Thinking Like an Economist.” It is a good book.

    I say that because her book made me change a structural paradigm I have in my head. Prior to reading this text, I had in my mind that everything went wrong when the business right took the Powell Memo, the libertarian right took Goldwaterism, and the religious right rose post Roe and it was all thrown into a mixer during the Reagan revolution. You can all sorts of well-being charts that dog-leg sometime between 1973 and 1981 or so.

    Elizabeth Popp Berman’s introduces the idea that part of the change has to be seen as the takeover of economic reasoning of a cost-benefit or structuralist model into how policy was set over an idea of doing the right thing because they were the right thing based on “commitments to universality, rights, and equality” (99). Basically, it is the triumph of the consequentialists over the deontologists. She does note the basic issues where my priors lay, noting that there was a lot of political issues entangled in the rise of the right as you can’t separate the economic from the political (140).

    The thing that really makes the book stand out is her use of and grasp of history – and that she shows that the institutionalization of the economic shift to efficiency wasn’t just dominated by one party. Embracing this move was a bipartisan approach from Kennedy though Clinton and beyond. If there’s a weakness to the text it is that she drops most of the history after Reagan, but we live in the world of the shift she outlines so including the new Democrats in depth might be beating too much of a dead horse. The bipartisan embrace means that this move is also internalized to the point where you don’t have to make the argument for efficiency anymore, but instead if you desire broad based policy you have to argue from that point and anticipate these sorts of objections about how you are going to pay for that if you want to do something because it needs to be done. The present gets little notice but there is mention of the Neo-Brandeisians (though exemplars like Tim Wu and Lina Khan aren’t mentioned by name) and an acknowledgement that there is a whole realm of policy argument to the left of the economic efficiency argument and that there is a possibility, at least in antitrust, that there is more than a very narrow understanding of what consumer welfare means under the Sherman Act.

    Ultimately though, for me it circles back to the many-headed policy demon that was already in my priors. Instead of completely reframing the challenge, it is a drawing of a different sort of structural barrier to any real positive change for a broad base of people.
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    14 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on April 23, 2022
    If you hang around federal agencies of the U.S. government, you can see the traces of economic thinking everywhere. Efficiency. Calculable trade-offs. Policies oriented around nudging. Democrat or Republican, economics thinking shapes the policy work of every modern White House. This book allows you to see how and why this came to be -- and how partisan arrangements were reconfigured through the introduction of economics into public policy.

    This book is both thick with historical detail and delightfully intriguing in its storytelling, tracing a through line of a discipline's entrenchment in Washington through people, institutions, policies, and actions. While the book is written to help explain this arrangement to non-economists, this book also helps economists put their norms and practices into broader perspective.
    9 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on September 7, 2023
    Narrator is only average—sometimes seems to be confused by the content and reads sentences without an understanding of pauses and emphasis. Book provides the history of how Democrats became nearly indistinguishable from Republicans in the way they governed according to microeconomic principles of efficiency—not Justice or equity or rights. For those of us continually disappointed with Carter, Clinton, Obama this explains why.
  • Reviewed in the United States on October 4, 2024
    If you want to understand why Democrats from the 1970s-2010s became increasingly beholden to economic efficiency, and in turn narrowed their vision for what the government could do, read this book.
  • Reviewed in the United States on October 19, 2022
    Thinking Like an Economist by Elizabeth Popp Berman is part a historical guide to the drip-by-drip immersion of economics and economic thinking into the sphere of policymaking, and secondly, it is an argument as to where such thinking has lead us astray in the values that the United States has traditionally held. It asks if the economic welfare of the country, and more so, whether morally, the nation has become bankrupt of the higher ideals established over the historical past. In particular, she takes to task the Democratic Party that has strayed from progressive ideals and, in its place, embraced the ideology of the market-driven, efficiency model of neoliberalism.

    First, the title. It is misleading; it is not about how a given economist, with all the economic thinking at hand, would look upon the world. Instead, a more complete title would be “How Democrats Gave Up Progressive Ideology for “Thinking Like an Economist.” If the title fooled you, well, so was I.

    Berman’s appeal to Democrats is that the big-picture issues of equality, rights, health and well-being, have been replaced by the mechanical operations of a market economy. This development has shaped our policy to the point where we have lost sense of our direction. She documents the process of early economists through the RAND group bringing expertise from industry and the military into larger chunks of government. A familiar milestone was Robert McNamara’s spreadsheets, using data to assess how the Vietnam was progressing (and lying about it). But it was also spreading into other segments of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, where money was now made available to hire more economists to influence the development of programs. Step by step, economists were infiltrating government decisions.

    One thorn that Berman particularly resents is that economic thinking is neutral regarding its intentions. See illustrates several examples that dispute those claims, but none more obvious than the Reagan “trickle-down” economics. Here, economic thinking was molded by the necessity to present economic models that supported their desired outcomes and to ignore all others. Social policy, market governance, and social regulation were now fully held in the hand of market-efficiency economists.

    She castigates Clinton and Obama for missed opportunities to reverse the trend. She feels Clinton not only didn’t reverse the current but embraced it even more. The economic collapse of 2007-8 was Obama’s opportunity to mend things, but it was an opportunity missed. In his defense, Obama publicly stated that the situation was so precarious that trying to keep his head above the water was a big enough challenge.

    I am not totally in agreement with Berman. In the post-WWII years, we gave ourselves a blank check to fill with big-picture thinking and ideas. Fighting communism, going to the moon, Medicare and Medicaid, and fighting poverty were all part of our history. But that check got smaller and smaller until resources became limited, and we needed to consider the word that had previously not been spoken: costs. We had to come up with ways of weighing cost-benefits, and economists filled that need. Economists were a necessity. We had to find a way to dig through the complexity to find simpler solutions as to whether a program is beneficial or not. So, to me, the development of economics in academics and then into government was needed.

    However, I am fully behind Berman in the migration of economics into law and the creation of statutes, case law, and administrative rulings that reduced the protections of workers and small businesses. The market-efficient law in business came to fruition in redefining anti-trust that discarded much of historic legislation. It was now about efficiency, not protection…as long as they don’t raise prices unfairly, it’s free to operate. This has played out to be not all it’s cracked up to be. Big tech and big mergers often work against the consumer. And that’s no considering the political power they hold.

    The historical documentation of the book is eye-opening. I learned about what was happening, ever so subtly, behind the scenes of our policymaking from the 1950s to today. I take some issue with her thesis of progressivism versus efficiency economics, but, as the saying goes, “what goes around, comes around,” and I think Americans are beginning to go back and ask the big-picture questions that could potentially reorient policy for the years to come.
    4 people found this helpful
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  • PIERPIER
    3.0 out of 5 stars Interessante ma difficoltoso da leggere
    Reviewed in Italy on June 1, 2024
    Elizabeth Popp Berman, sociologa, è direttrice e professoressa di studi organizzativi presso l'Università del Michigan ed è l'autore di questo libro. Il tema che viene sviluppato nel libro è la storia di come il modo di pensare in stile economico sia divenuto sempre più dominante all'interno delle istituzioni degli Stati Uniti.

    La storia della introduzione del modo di pensare economico nelle istituzioni si può far risalire inizialmente al cosiddetto "istituzionalismo", anni '30, che iniziò ad introdurre una varietà di uffici governativi nei quali gli economisti avevano un ruolo siglificativo. Il secondo passo fu la creazione dopo la guerra del Comitato dei consiglieri economici presso la Casa Bianca. Un ulteriore significativo avvenimento fu l'utilizzo della Rand corporation da parte della Aviazione degli Stati Uniti per analisi sul sistema di difesa aereo tramite la System analysis. La nomina di Mac Namara come Segretario della Difesa, con l'amministrazione Kenendy, fu un ulteriore tassello per il rafforzamento dell'approccio della System Analysis. A questo seguì l'adozione, con alterne fortune, dei sistemi di programmazione e pianificazione economica (PPBS) nelle agenzie governative.

    Nonostante la Great Society di Johnson avesse dei valori in conflitto con la visione economicista questa facilitò la rapida diffusione dello stile economico nel governo federale e l'efficienza divenne un fine centrale di politica sociale. Inizialmente ci fu una certa continuità nell'uso dello stile economico nell'amministrazione Nixon, anche se i conservatori tendevano ad usare lo stile economico per raggiungere obiettivi macroeconomici.

    L'approccio economico per quanto di presentasse come neutrale in realtà venne in conflitto con approcci diversi alla politica sociale. Lo stile economico e la centralità della efficenza si espanse anche nel ambito della legislazione riguardante l'antitrust e divenne quindi anche un riferimento per il quadro normativo legale. Anche con l'amministrazione Carter la efficienza e lo stile economico rimasero al centro delle politiche sociali e antitrust. Un altro ambito dove si diffuse l'approccio economicista, cambiando completamente la legislazione, fu quello dei trasporti e delle telecomunicazioni dove si diffuse la deregolamentazione.

    Con la presidenza Regan l'atteggiamento cambiò ancora, in realtà questa amministrazione non era interessata all'aspetto scientifico, piuttosto sfruttava le agenzie governative per giustificare i suoi programmi governativi. Di fatto ci fù una massiccia riduzione dei budget per gli uffici governativi che rimasero con poche risorse per le ricerche di politiche sociali. L'obiettivo di Regan era rimuovere le restrizioni governative alle aziende, e il ragionamento economico era solo un mezzo per raggiungere i suoi obiettivi politici, in questo fu essenziale la crescita di importanza e di rasppresentanza nelle istituzioni della Scuola di Chicago.

    L'obiettivo iniziale degli economisti era quello di usare il regionamento economico per migliorare l'azione di governo; ma una volta che tale stile divenne maggioritario andava in contrasto con i valori puramante morali e di principio, riducendo lo spazio per approcci alternativi. Da un punto di vista politico l'adozione da parte dei Democratici del pensiero economicista ha ridotto lo spazio per politiche sociali più coraggiose nella sanità e nella tutela ambientale in particolare, anche se dopo il 2008 la sinistra del partito democratico ha riabbracciato politiche che sono al di fuori dello stile economico. Nelle conclusioni l'autrice afferma che anche se lo stile economico va incoraggiato è necessario costruire un quadro intellettuale che vada oltre l'approccio economico, e che metta al centro valori come l'uguaglianza, giustizia razziale, diritti e comunità.

    Il tema del libro è senz'altro interessante e svolto con grande dovizia di particolari e ricostruzioni storiche dettagliate. Detto ciò, il fatto che si addentri in tutta una serie di nomi, sigle di amministrazioni statunitensi finisce per essere dispersivo e piuttosto faticoso da seguire. Più che un libro dedicato al grande pubblico pare un ottimo studio per addetti ai lavori, pertanto lo consiglio solo a chi è vermente interessato all'argomento e alla storia degli Stati Uniti.
  • Gerard de Valence
    4.0 out of 5 stars How social, moral and ethical issues became ones about markets, allocation and tax
    Reviewed in Australia on February 1, 2024
    The book details how what she calls “the economic style of reasoning,” has become the dominant way of thinking about public policy in the United States. This is usually (almost universally) seen as a result of the movement led by Hayek and the Mont Pelerin Society that became known as neo-liberalism. Instead, Berman argues, “the most important advocates for the economic style in governance consistently came from the center-left.”

    In the 1960s two intellectual communities within economics played the crucial role. One was a systems analysis group from RAND Corp. at the beginning of the Kennedy administration. The other was a network of university economists specializing in industrial organization, first at Harvard University and later at the University of Chicago.

    These economists became key advisors and formulators of policy, introducing cost-benefit analysis and other tools for assessing government policies and raising efficiency above other policy goals. As macroeconomics descended into doctrinal disputes about fiscal and monetary policy in the 1970s, US conservatives turned this into a deregulatory agenda. At the same time institutional economists lost their standing in university departments as the mathematical turn after Samuelson marginalised their work.

    The book records (in great detail) the development of the economic style, how many of its leading advocates came from the Democratic party and the left, and how the right strategically used these ideas to promote policies that turned social, moral and ethical issues into ones about markets, allocation and tax. Highly recommended.