Abstract
In "Thinking Like an Economist", Elizabeth Popp Berman (2022) explores how a particular mode of economic reasoning—centered on efficiency, trade-offs and cost-benefit analysis—has become the dominant discourse governing policy-making in the United States. [...]
Far from rejecting economics, her aim is to highlight its normative bias: she argues that efficiency has insidiously replaced equality and justice as the dominant values guiding policy-making.
Extract
[...] public policy. Princeton University Press. Golembeski, C. (2022). Book review: Thinking like an economist: How efficiency replaced equality in U.S. public policy. [...]
[...] This paradigm had spread to most fields of government by the 1970s from social welfare to environmental regulation. This is the question at the heart of Berman's book: What happens in democratic government when expedience is prized over justice? Her judgement is clear enough: the economic model constrains political imagination by redefining what counts as rational or legitimate policy. Is efficiency a neutral analytic tool or a normative filter? Berman's history, as we shall see, demonstrates that efficiency is not value-free; it could not be more normative. [...]
[...] Efficiency should be seen as a lens, not the only basis for deciding if a policy is worthwhile. Berman's Thinking Like an Economist makes a deep critique of how efficiency has displaced equality in U.S. policy making. By tracing its institutional ascent, she exposes how technocratic reasoning reshaped progressive ideals and constrained democratic imagination. Personal review Efficiency may appear logical and realistic, but it often conceals normative decisions about which interests are chosen. I was especially impressed by the ways that Democratic leaders seem to have internalized this framework, thereby accidentally limiting social programs' moral reach. [...]
[...] Armed with $80 million in federal contracts, RAND researchers analysed economic theories including moral hazard and lent their influence to health policy. Their results persuaded President Nixon not to pursue universal expansion of Medicare but rather to advocate for cost-sharing and market incentives (Golembeski, 2022; Berman, 2022). In other words, the technical replaced the moral as a domain of reasoning: liberal arguments were rearticulated in terms of rights and universality amounts to inefficiency. I agree with Berman that efficiency has become a moral screen, one filtering in favour of what can be counted at the cost of things like dignity and solidarity. [...]
[...] Berman separates the economic style from neoliberalism: where the former is a mode of thought, the latter an ideological campaign. This difference explains why liberal governments, running from Johnson to Obama, still resorted to cost-benefit analysis even at times when state power was expanding. But the technocratic synching of economic logic - via PPBS, OMB review, and policy schools - planted what Golembeski (2022) terms a "permanent home" for efficiency in Washington. Her analysis is in line with scholars, such as Clara Mattei (2022), who link technocratic austerity with democratic backsliding. [...]
