The Economists' Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society [B1952]

2019 HCDJ, nice except for some pencil underlining and notes. The Economists' Hour is the biography of a revolution: The story of how economists who believed in the power and the glory of free markets transformed the business of government, the conduct of business and, as a result, the patterns of everyday life. In the four decades between 1969 and 2008, these economists played a leading role in reshaping taxation and public spending and clearing the way for globalization. They reshaped the government's approach to regulation, assigning a value to human life to determine which rules are worthwhile. Economists even convinced President Nixon to end military conscription. The United States was the epicenter of the intellectual ferment, but the embrace of markets was a global phenomenon, seizing the imagination of politicians in countries including the United Kingdom, Chile and New Zealand.

This book is also a reckoning. The revolution failed to deliver on its central promise of increased prosperity. In the United States, growth has slowed in every successive decade since the 1960s. And the cost of the failure was steep. Policymakers traded well-paid jobs for low-cost electronics; the loss of work weakened the fabric of society and of democracy. Soaring inequality extends far beyond incomes: Life expectancy for less affluent Americans has declined in recent years. And the focus on efficiency has come at the expense of the future: Lower taxes instead of education and infrastructure; limited environmental regulation as oceans rise and California burns.

From recent-ish Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "Appelbaum has written a good account of the free-market 'conservative revolution' in economics and its failure to produce a stable, prosperous society."; "Exceptionally insightful and informative semi-chronological history of the economists who f'd up the nation, how they got into 'the room', and what they said to convince others to listen to them. By the way, Appelbaum cut his teeth as a local reporter in the Carolinas during the 2008 housing market crash and was a whistleblower who uncovered the wrongdoings of the bankers, and tried to warn the world of the impending collapse."; "Solid narrative history here. Appelbaum isn't afraid to dish some hot takes. For example, there were a couple of notable zingers on the theme of economists not actually speaking to the humans in real life who were being (adversely, almost always) impacted the most by their theories and policy actions: uber conservative monetary policy, tax cuts for rich people, deregulated "markets in everything" that makes those markets more destructive and chaotic, etc. etc. As a college economics major circa 2011, I might have not been so receptive to this book. But over time, it gets more and more obvious that 'elegant' textbook theories in social science don't translate to real life' - even though they should!!"; "The book is good and he capably describes the way that these very smart men smashed up the world with their beautifully formed, completely wrong understandings of what people do and what they are for."