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2023 Jotwell: J. Things We Like 1 (2023)

handle is hein.journals/jotwell2023 and id is 1 raw text is: Legal History The Journal of Things We Like (Lots) https://Iegalhist.jotwell.com The Economic Style Author : Kunal Parker Date : January 2, 2023 Elizabeth Popp Berman, Thinking Like a Eoomist: o fticienc aeladed Equality in U.S. Public Policy (2022). Elizabeth Popp Berman's Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy is a very smart book that deserves a wide audience. The book explores the rise to prominence of an economic style of reasoning in U.S. policymaking in the post-World War II decades. Between 1950 and 1980, Popp Berman shows, this style pervaded realm after realm of policymaking, from social welfare programs to the regulation of markets to the management of the environment. The chief institutionalizers of the economic style of reasoning were not neoliberals or libertarians (these would become truly prominent in government only after the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980). Instead, they were Democrat- appointed economists and the bureaucrats they worked with and influenced. Albeit not ideologically opposed either to social programs or to market intervention, these economists and bureaucrats insisted that social goals be met as efficiently as possible and that market solutions were generally preferable to interventionist ones. Wherever possible, they pushed cost-benefit analyses and reviews within administrative agencies, urged the dismantling of early-twentieth- century market controls, and sought to achieve ends by creating markets for entitlements rather than by imposing standards by fiat. In all this, they shared much with those further to their right. By the time Ronald Reagan was elected president, the economic style introduced during the Kennedy and Johnson years had become thoroughly entrenched. Indeed, it had become the hegemonic approach to solving all manner of public problems, its ubiquity and self-evidence continually reinforcing each other. Reagan Republicans would employ the economic style, but the ground had been laid for them decades earlier by Democrats. Indeed, Popp Berman argues, Democrats proved far less strategic in using the economic style than Reaganites. Democrats privileged it as a method in context after context and allowed it to subsume their substantive ends. By contrast, Reaganites were more selective and often successfully subordinated it to their substantive ends. In Popp Berman's rendering, the economic style in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s was resolutely microeconomic. As she puts it: It starts with basic microeconomic concepts, like incentives, various forms of efficiency, and externalities. It takes a distinctive approach to policy problems that includes using models to simplify, quantifying, weighing costs and benefits, and thinking at the margin. (P. 5.) By focusing on the microeconomic at a time when Keynesian macroeconomics was at the height of its prestige, Popp Berman is doing something highly original: directing the reader's attention away from the well-worn secondary literature on postwar macroeconomic debates toward a vital and burgeoning realm of activity, one where microeconomic styles of reasoning were actively being instantiated within administrative agencies. She is also doing something extremely valuable in showing her readers that left-of-center thinkers, rather than those to their right, were the progenitors of the economic style in American government. Thanks to Popp Berman, we get not only a sense of the complex roots of our current market-oriented approaches, but also a sense that market approaches were not-and hence need not be-the exclusive preserve of the Right. To my mind, however, Thinking Like an Economists real strength lies in its detailed examination of the instantiation of the economic style. This is not an account of high economic theory, but a delving into the tangled politics of regulation, agency by agency, sector by sector. It is precisely the richness of Popp Berman's account that enables my interrogation of the from/to account she provides. The subtitle of the book is: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy. At least to me, this 1/3

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