Thinking Like an Economist, Elizabeth Popp Berman
Thinking Like an Economist, Elizabeth Popp Berman
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Thinking Like an Economist
How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy

Author: Elizabeth Popp Berman

Narrator: Suzie Althens

Unabridged: 12 hr 3 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/05/2022

Synopsis

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.

About Elizabeth Popp Berman

Elizabeth Popp Berman is associate professor of organizational studies at the University of Michigan and the author of Creating the Market University: How Academic Science Became an Economic Engine. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Reviews

Goodreads review by David

Few books change my thinking the way Elizabeth Popp Berman's has. I was broadly sympathetic to her broader premise of a shift in the way policy is conducted in the neoliberal era, but framing it as a question of economic reasoning and how it ingratiated itself into the mainstream of policy circles w......more

Goodreads review by David

A cliché reflecting the sometimes adversarial view by sociologists of economists and their outsized role in public debates is the lament that there is a Council of Economic Advisors but no Council of Sociological Advisors. This book is, in essence, an attempt to treat the question of why that is as......more

Goodreads review by Tino

The topic is interesting, sure, but not worthy of a book. Everything one needs to know about this topic could be written in a short essay. This was very dry reading but the content partly made up for it. 2.5-3 stars.......more

Goodreads review by John

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 rig......more

Goodreads review by Quin

A fascinating but dry read on the ideology of “efficiency and choice” came to override larger social justice goals like equality in public policy. A someone in a human services field, it is very telling how we are taught to idealize economic rationality and subject everything to “evaluation.” I defi......more

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