Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year"
"Indispensable. Deeply researched and powerfully argued, it is easily one of the most important studies of American governance in many years."
---Simon Torracinta, Boston Review"Berman is well worth reading for deeply researched detail on how market-fundamentalist economics colonized the administrative state and thus weakened progressivism."
---Robert Kuttner, American Prospect"The historical account in
Thinking like an Economist, which makes up the bulk of the book, is an original, insightful, and persuasive story. . . . Berman provides a fresh perspective emphasizing a wide variety of microeconomic topics, including antitrust law, antipoverty policy, health care, and the environment."
---Jason Furman, Foreign Affairs"Berman is at her best as an archeologist of ideas, digging through archives to excavate the origins of the economic style of reasoning and its takeover of federal policymaking."
---Idrees Kahloon, The New Yorker"As a non-economist who writes about economics, I felt seen by Berman."
---Peter Coy, New York Times"
The import of her book is clear to me. It’s OK to believe there’s value beyond markets and competition, and while efficiency can be a useful goal in many cases, sometimes we should embrace deeper values around fairness, and dare I say it, right and wrong.
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---John Warner, Chicago Tribune"This outstanding work is highly recommended. . . . Essential." * Choice *
"It turns out this kind of thinking—what Berman calls ‘the economic style of reasoning'—has taken over not just environmental policy but the entire US policy bureaucracy, to dismal results. It’s as much something Democrats have done to themselves as anything forced by the right. One always enjoys having one’s priors validated by scholars of much greater distinction than oneself, so I was delighted to read the book."
---David Roberts, Volts"A captivating and detailed historical account of the rise of economics and economists’ influence within the US Administration during the 1960s and 1970s."
---Cléo Chassonnery-Zaïgouche and Aurélien Goutsmedt, Oeconomia"An engaging account of the role that economists and government advisors with an economics training played in shaping public policy in the US during the post-war period. . . .Very well written and extremely erudite."
---Giulio Zanella, Oeconomia
